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THIS EDITION IS LIMITED TO ONE HUNDRED AND 
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WIND OF DESTINY 



WIND OF DESTINY 



BY 
SARA LINDSAY COLEMAN 




Garden City New York 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

1916 



dopY^ 



PY 






Copyright, 1916, by 

DOUBLEDAY, PaGE & CoMPANY 

All rights reserved, including that of 

translation into foreign languages, 

including the Scandinavian 




-2 1916 



^Cl.A4454arj g^ 



FOREWORD 

The letters in this story are real letters. I know this 
because they were written to me by the man the world 
knows as O. Henry, author, and only as the author. 
Not half a dozen people knew the real Sydney Porter, 
and the man was greater than the author. 

There are other letters which are mine own, and no 
other eyes shall see them. But the letters in this book 
were not written to me as a woman, but rather to the 
little girl of his memory who lived next door to him in 
the street of Yesterday. 

The background for the letters is pure fiction. Maybe 
I have let more of myself creep into this tale than I 
had planned. If this be true, the reason is that my 
whole thought centred upon revealing Sydney Porter 
to the lovers of O. HENRY. 

Sara Lindsay Coleman. 



WIND OF DESTINY 



WIND OF DESTINY 

* August 5th. 

Saturday Morning. 

I think from the day Dicky left us I have been wait- 
ing with bated breath for this letter. Ghost of our great, 
great, great-grandfather who lies in the old cemetery 
at Lexington, Virginia! Dicky has been answering a 
"Personal" in the New York Herald. 

"Of course you won't understand, Caroline," she 
writes me. "There never was a day in your life when 
you would have understood. Books are people to you. 
You live placidly in that dull little mountain town, and 
when your time comes you'll die there placidly. Had 
you been Eve the angel with the flaming sword would 
never have had the unpleasant duty of driving you out. 
You to tempt a man ! You're like that coldly beautiful 
statue Pygmalion fashioned. She waked to life, but 
you never will. I wonder why I tell you, Caroline. 
The probationers in this hospital — probably in all big 
city hospitals — are made to feel like the dirt under foot 
— if there was under foot any good honest earth-dirt. 
Every time her betters pass her she's got to paste her- 
self against the wall, and all the inmates of the hospital 



4 WIND OF DESTINY 

are her betters. There are some nice young doctors — 
but it is against discipline for her to speak to them. 
If she does the older nurses punish her with extra work. 
Last night, after a hard day, I walked on the Avenue — 
we are just a block away — and one of the beautiful 
doors opened just like enchantment, thrown back by a 
liveried servant. An old, old man came out. Per- 
haps it would have been different if youth and beauty 
had floated out. All that was his seemed so wasted. 
It was just the youth in me, I suppose, that was so 
fierce at life and its injustices. The lights down the 
Avenue beckoned and beckoned. I wanted to follow 
them. The distance was swallowing the old man in his 
car. Just for once in my life I wanted a taste of the 
city at night; I wanted to forget the groans of the sick 
and dying. You've never been a prune, and a potato, 
and a slice of bread. Try it, Caroline. I, who used to 
be Henrietta Dickenson, am now one thousand four 
hundred prunes. I am one thousand and ninety-five 
potatoes. I spare you the slices of bread. If you 
think I exaggerate make the count yourself. Prunes 
four times a week — five of them to a saucer. Potatoes 
each meal — meals three per day. Potatoes, prunes, 
and bread — plain, common food — maybe that's why 
I have done such a common thing. 

*'I turned off the Avenue. At a news stand I picked 
up the Herald. 'You don't want that. You want an 



WIND OF DESTINY 5 

evening paper,' the boy said. Fate or the boy, I know 
not which, I took the Herald. The 'ad' I answered 
says the man is lonely; that he wants an attractive 
woman friend. The 'ad' was signed Telemachus. 
His letter fairly scintillated. I answered. He wrote 
again. Now he asks for a meeting. But the 
letter is oh, so chivalrous, so witty, so wonderful, 
Caroline. And there's a reticence, an impersonal note 
in it that piques a woman's fancy, stirs her imagina- 
tion — — 

"I am leaving the hospital now. It is dusk^ — the time 
to meet the hero of one's adventure. The place of 
meeting is not far away. It is only a few blocks down 
Madison from the hospital. I have stolen out in a 
gypsy dress that I wore at the hospital dance. I have 
thrown a long dark cloak about me. In the twilight 
I shall escape^ — not be snatched up and sent to Bellevue. 
Don't worry, Caroline." 

Don't worry! Since the day Dicky became our 
child (mother's sister's only child, a little wailing thing 
three days old and orphaned of her own mother) I 
have worried. Now my heart clutches with fear as 
it clutched the day, now a year past, when Dicky threw 
into our quiet midst the bomb of her determination 
to go away from us. Nineteen-year-old Dicky alone 
in the great city of New York. Our guarded and 
treasured lambkin thrown into the mouths of wolves. 



G WIND OF DESTINY 

A trained nurse! Under discipline! Dicky, the free, 
gypsy child of our hearts. 

We, poor dear old mammy and I, register Dicky's 
emotions as faithfully as a trusted thermometer. That 
Dicky should have to rise with the sun, and, having 
risen, have to put her own room in order. That Dicky 
must be silent in the presence of her superiors. It sounds 
like the court of King James, anyway, and not free Amer- 
ica — not that the court of any king would awe Dicky. 

Once, before we came to live in the mountains, when 
Dicky was six, we paid a visit to grandmother. Dicky 
left a saucer of cottage cheese untasted at her plate. 
Next morning at breakfast it was there, at dinner, at 
tea. I saw when we went in to tea that the child's 
endurance of the saucer of cheese had been reached, 
and my coward teeth chattered in terror — grandmother 
had attempted to discipline the child before — ^the 
result being that for three interminable days Dicky 
had appeared at meals, brought down in the arms of 
grandmother's old coloured butler, robbed of her clothes 
and dressed in a royal defiance and a flannel nightgown. 
Dicky lifted the offending cheese daintily. She didn't 
look at me or at grandmother. She spoke to old Ben- 
jamin, and she was as perfectly poised and dignified 
as a little duchess. "Take it away, please," she said; 
"it's spoiled." 

"Her mar's dead, an' yore mar's dead," mammy 



WIND OF DESTINY 7 

said one morning as I hurried away to my school teach- 
ing; "if you an' Mr. John can't an' won't do nothin' 
to save the child from ruin, mammy will." 

I came home the day of mammy's disciplining of 
Dicky to find the child digging up the lawn. If we 
do live in the heart of the Blue Ridge hills I cling to a 
remembered civilization — the front yard is the lawn. 
Gypsy curls blowing, gypsy eyes flashing, Dicky with 
each tiny upflung spade of dirt was shrieking (she 
couldn't have been more than seven), "Mr. Devil, Mr. 
Devil, can you hear.? I'm going to keep on digging 
till I get close enough and you can hear. I want you 
to shovel mammy into your hot fire and burn her up." 

I picked Dicky up that day and kissed the anger out 
of her flaming little face, and a few minutes later I 
heard her say in the voice that makes us wax in Dicky's 
hands, "I was just a little angry with you. Mammy, 
and I asked Mr. Devil to burn you up^ — but I'm not 
mad now, and I hope he won't." 

Dicky went to New York. We knew that she would. 
That's why John and I, dear faithful old mammy, too, 
were so helpless, our hearts contracting in fear. 

August ISth. 
Sunday Night. 
Scientists tell us that a change that is slow but com- 
plete takes place in the human body every seven years. 



8 WIND OF DESTINY 

They are wrong about the process. It happens in the 
twinkhng of an eye — like that change in the far-off 
judgment day of which the Bible tells. I know. This 
very day it happened to me. This Sabbath morning 
I waked a healthy, happy, normal spinster behind 
whom lay, except for this anxiety Dicky gives, almost 
thirty barren-of -emotion years. 

Breakfast was not ready when I came down, so I 
rushed up the lane. If we lived more pretentiously 
it would be the drive. Beyond lay the white road that 
leads up to Marsville and trails round the mountain and 
out to a wider life. 

The hills that neighbour with the blue ether were 
shaking night-caps of trailing mist from their heads. 
The mountain world breathed deep of August — ^pro- 
claimed it exultantly in its vivid summer green as yet 
untouched by change; in its full-eared, ripening corn, 
massed on the hills like troops of soldiers. The insect 
shrills were August noises as were the lazy little chirps 
of the birds that have forgotten their joyous outpour- 
ings of spring. I loved it all — even the crow circling 
majestically about the distant hills so far away that 
his raucous cry came musically^ — and all of it contented 
me. Quite forgetting my approaching thirtieth birth- 
day I threw a kiss to that mountain on the skyline that 
is so like a camel with a humpy back. There's always 
been a secret understanding between that mountain 



WIND OF DESTINY 9 

and me, I suppose it is left over from my young 
girlhood, I was only eighteen the first time I saw Camel 
Back, that some day he would dump all his treasures 
into my lap— treasures from all the lands of the East. 
Yesterday I got another editor's check— Camel Back 
has always held me steady under my rejections, hence 
the salute. Down through the ages how the world 
would have laughed if the Egyptians had made their 
Sphmx a man— wise Egyptians. As I threw the kiss 
to my mountain the shadow of no man was on my heart, 
or had ever been, but I felt the thrill of life's infinite 
mystery and promise— felt it and called it an editor's 
check. At thirty a spinster woman may begin to run 
to fat, or she may show tendencies to shrivel, but I 
boldly declare, my knowledge dating back some dozen 
hours, that her heart is unwrinkled, ridiculously young, 
and scanning the horizon for Eastern treasures that the 
camels that hang in the skyline are to pour into her 
lap. 

Back home, breakfast over, as John left the table he 
tossed a letter to me. It was Dicky's letter for which 
I have waited a whole week. It is in answer to the 
dozen I have sent out to her— like wireless messages 
of distress. 

In the yard, out beyond the shadow of the big white 
pines, drying my hair— the women of Marsville have no 
beauty parlour iu which to ruin it with dry air — lying 



10 WIND OF DESTINY 

full length in the sun, my head pillowed on a cushion, 
pondering Dicky's letter, reading it over and over, I 
was jarred out of my reverie by a poke in the ribs and 
the mountaineer's, " Howdy." I failed to respond, was 
poked in the ribs a second time, sprang up indignantly 
and glared into the dirty, smiling landscape that is the 
face of old Sallie Singleton. "I thought I knowed that 
old back," her harsh voice said amiably. Old back, 
indeed. Unmindful of my lack of cordiality the flood- 
gates opened and harsh verbal oceans submerged me. 
I tried to shut it out, but I could not. "Mis Golightly 
hadn't let the fire go out on her hearth for nigh forty 
year, but she went over the mountain to visit her 
daughter that had her first baby. In hearing of the 
train she took homesick and hiked it back. Savannah 
Lou was old-like, as I knowed, and, as I knowed, her 
beau died. He was full of debts as a dog is full of fleas, 
and the Lord knowed what he was doing when He took 
him. She had a picter left stid o' a man, and she was a 
sight happier with the picter then she'd a ben with the 
man. When he was courtin' they'd set and set, and 
talk and talk. He never took her nowhere — not even 
as far as her nose. She set store by the picter. She'd 
had a picter man put whiskers on it. She'd alius knowed 
whiskers'd become him, but he was stubborn and 

wouldn't grow 'em. She " 

But I had fled, running for my life — or was it to 



WIND OF DESTINY 11 

save the life of old Sallie that I ran? In the twinkling 
of an eye the mysterious change had come. Sallie had 
poked in the back, the old back that she knowed, a 
contented spinster teacher. A horse whisked about 
in the shafts and made to go in a direction contrary to 
the one he was travelling might understand the be- 
wilderment of the woman who fled from Sallie Single- 
ton. I did not. We are strange creatures, blown 
upon by winds from the Invisible. We dwell forever 
in a little fenced-about cleared plot of ground that is 
our daily life and we are frightened if we but glimpse 
beyond the cleared land. I had looked over the fence, 
and I had seen a trackless region. In sudden panic 
I hated placid spinster teachers content to trudge 
their sober path through all the days allotted to them; 
in sudden terror age with its hideous potentialities of 
loneliness fell upon me. Age and old Sallie grown 
gray and dirtier but always with the Puck-like knowl- 
edge of the psychologic moment at which to torture 
me with the neighbourhood gossip. Age and John, 
dear, good John on one side of the fireplace winter 
nights roaring at me the advancement of his rheuma- 
tism and I on the other side roaring back the increasing 
feebleness of my digestion. 

All day this spectre, this fear of the future, has held 
me by the throat. All day I have stumbled along in a 
maze of distorted thought — swept from all moorings of 



12 WIND OF DESTINY 

common sense. Now I have come into the night, the 
big, silent, star-filled night to ask peace of it. Here 
under the giant pines that stand like sentinels to guard 
the peace of the old house I sit on the bench. How still 
and warm and sweet — a white, white August night, 
for the coming moon lights the sky. Above all nights 
I have loved these August nights — the clematis drop- 
ping from the upper porch airy and diaphanous as a 
bride's veil, and there in the border, running parallel 
with the low, long, rambling, gray, gray old house the 
white phlox in masses neighbouring with the August 
lilies. Looking at the lilies I catch my breath in pain. 
In their faint, sweet breathings they say to me, "We 
live but for a day. Take warning. Youth flees, dies 
as we die." 

John comes to the hall door and peers out into the 
dimness of the shadowy pines. "Honey," he calls, 
"are you out there.^^ Good-night. I'm turning in." 
I call back, "Good-night." 

Big and red the moon that is only a little past full 
pushes over the hill. The desire to taste the night, to 
drown my tumult in its peace seizes me. Out on the 
hill-top, alone face to face with the night, and unafraid, 
I am indeed swept from my moorings. There to the 
east, where the skyline is so sharply irregular, just where 
Camel Back marches eternally on the horizon, he makes 
me think of a city I have never seen. I want to use 



WIND OF DESTINY 13 

his back as a stepping stone to the moon and look down 
on a play I have just been reading about. When the 
curtain lifts I want to see those real camels marching 
past, their background a sunrise in the desert. 

The mountains I love, my beautiful, misty moun- 
tains, are a giant wall of earth to-night. I want to get 
over the wall. I want to sit in that theatre, and after 
the play I want to be swept along in the street with the 
surging crowd and go into a gorgeous, glittery place 
and eat delicious things I have never tasted, wearing 
the sort of dress I have never seen. I want to live. 
If but for one hour of life I want my youth. I could be 
part of that pulsing, beating life, part of that splendid 
friction — ^man's mind stimulating man's mind. 

Back in my room, ready for bed, the light blown out, 
sitting at the window, I acknowledge to myself that 
the cause of all the day's emotional upheaval has been 
Dicky's letter. Dicky's letter that reads: 

"In my brave attire I went to meet the hero of my 
'Personal.' He got cold feet, Caroline. lie did not 
come. He sent a messenger boy. I had written my 
foolish heart out to him. I had told him the things I 
tell you. Yes, I know it is reckless to write like that 
to a man one never saw. Try being a prune and a po- 
tato and a slice of bread, though, before you condemn 
me. 

"His letter is the dearest ever, Caroline. I have read 



14 WIND OF DESTINY 

it over and over. 'Little gypsy child of nineteen, will 
you be just a little disappointed that the messenger 
boy is there and not I? Will you believe that I am 
going against my desire when I stay away? It isn't 
fair to you that I meet you. It is not fair to the nice 
little girl homesick for her southland who has never as 
yet spoken to a man to whom she has not been intro- 
duced. The "ad" was just a wager between a man 
and me. My name will mean nothing to you, but I 
sign it.' 

"The name was Robert Haralson, Caroline. And 
who can say why things happen as they do? Who can 
really tell why that door flung open on the Avenue to 
let an old man out should have stirred me to such 
rebellion that I who have been well raised by you 
and dear old mammy should have done such a madcap 
thing. The name did mean something to me — it brought 
vague memories — where had I known a Robert Har- 
alson? And — queer world that it is — I got back to my 
room to find the answer to my question on the table. 
Mary Tate answered it. When you and good old John 
squeezed all the money you could out of the thin acres 
of land that we call home and sent me to school I met 
Mary. Perhaps you remember. But she was not a 
special chum. Soon she is coming on to New York for 
her first visit. She has just left Roseboro and there 
everybody is talking about Robert Haralson, known at 



WIND OF DESTINY 15 

home still as Bobby. Everj^body is saying that he 
was the cleverest and the most popular lad that the 
town ever raised. A brilliant future was prophesied 
for him, but he got a wanderlust and went trailing off to 
the ends of the earth. Roseboro has just discovered 
that America's most brilliant writer and playwright, to 
quote the papers, is none other than the man who as a 
little lad spilled the family wash — not the clean wash — • 
in front of the Methodist Church as the congregation 
filed out from a revival service, and almost died of shy- 
ness. Roseboro, of course, is shaking congratulatory 
hands with itself that its prophecy has come true. 
Everywhere you go they talk of Bobby. Now he 
seems permanently to have settled in New York and 
to have found himself. Mary asks me if I have read, 
* Heart of the World.' It came out anonymously, as 
did no end of brilliant stories. But as a playwright he 
can no longer hide behind his anonymity. Mary is 
coming to New York soon. She wants to meet him. 
She begs for my assistance. Her letter closes like this: 
*It can be done, Dicky. Gossip says further that shy 
Bobby Haralson loved one girl like mad. That girl was 
Caroline Howard.' 

" Dear Caroline, I've fallen in love with Bobby's fas- 
cinating letters. I've fallen in love with his chivalrous 
protection of me, with his, 'Little gypsy girl of nine- 
teen.' Right this minute his card, name, and address 



16 WIND OF DESTINY 

lie on my table — and I am lonesomer than I was before 
I answered the 'ad' but — I won't do what it is in my 
mind to do. It is your Bobby Haralson." 

The clipping Dicky sent says that Mr. Haralson, who is 
just begin ing to be known as Mr. Haralson, is at present 
one of the most interesting men in American literature. 
That he has achieved distinction both in fiction and in 
drama. That it is difiicult to say in which he holds the 
more prominent position, that when so many writers 
seem to have written themselves out, he never seems 
to write up to the full extent of his powers, that always 
there is that sense of power held in reserve. 

Dicky sent a clipping from a Roseboro newspaper 
that tells the story of Bobby's heroism on shipboard 
coming from one of the lands of the Far East. I remem- 
ber that story. It was some years ago. In mid-sea the 
engines broke down, the boat sprung a leak, and the 
men were forced to bail the water from the boat. No 
ship came near, and one night a frightful storm swept 
the sea. With the boat at the mercy of the waves the 
firemen deserted the boilers. It was then that the 
blood of Bobby's ancestors spoke in him; Old Gover- 
nor Haralson, Bobby's grandfather, was a leader of men, 
could sway them. And father told me that Bobby's 
young father in a charge at the battle of Shilo was a 
figure he never forgot. He said the young Colonel as 
he swept into battle at the head of his men wore a 



WIND OF DESTINY 17 

beautiful, uplifted, unearthly sort of expression and 
that he, my father, had often heard him say he had 
never felt the sensation of fear on a battlefield. So I 
know just how Bobby Haralson loomed above the dis- 
couraged men that night, just how steady his voice 
was when he told them that the firemen had deserted 
their posts saying it was death to go down into the 
hold, but that he was going, and if they were men they 
would follow him. Wet and naked and blistered in the 
water that was waist-deep in the ship's hold, death 
within and death without, with no hope of saving the 
ship, with no help possible had help been near, strug- 
gling to hold their places along the rope line they hauled 
the buckets of water up, gaining perceptibly then losing 
again, but sending a song up whether there was 
the gain of an inch of water or that much loss — a 
song that rose above the roar of the sea, hungry for 
what surely seemed its prey, and the hiss of the great 
boilers. 

When we left Roseboro I was fourteen. Bobby 
must have been eighteen. A fence divided his house 
from ours. There was a side gate, for the families 
were intimate, but, mostly, he leaped it. Do I re- 
member Bobby .'^ I have not thought of him in years, 
but to-night some little door of the brain long closed 
opens and out of it comes my almost forgotten boy 
friend Bobby, like a ghost. Why, just that minute I 



18 WIND OF DESTINY 

saw his little flashing smile. It came right through 
the moonlit window as a friendly hand reaches out to 
one on the street of a strange city. 

It must be very late, but how wide awake I am. 
And how sweet the tuberoses there in the border under 
my window are. They seem to float in still pools of 
moonlight. As they pour their heavy fragrance over 
me the fancy comes, born of the silver, moon-flooded 
night, I suppose, that they are trying to tell me some- 
thing. 

Maybe they are. The tuberose has a personality, 
strong friends and stout enemies, like some people. 
There is nothing negative about it. The fancy persists. 
Ah, I have it! Another little brain door swings wide. 
But it wasn't a tuberose. Bobby and the big boys, 
his friends, have been on a tramp, they are again stand- 
ing under my window, they have waked me with the 
old familiar whistle. Mother has said I may have the 
magnolias Bobby wants to send up at midnight if I 
won't speak to the boys, if the boys won't speak to me, 
and she has let Bobby suspend a cord from my second- 
story window. I am fourteen years old again, and 
through the half-closed shutters I am tugging desper- 
ately at those magnolias. Suppressed giggles from the 
boys, suppressed giggles from me, too, and they ascend 
with slow majesty. Inside the window the secret of 
their heaviness is revealed. Candy — tons of it. The 



WIND OF DESTINY 19 

devil gets every inhabitant of Marsville who dances, 
but in spite of the devil I waltz merrily to my bed. 

September Mth. 

Sunday. 

Yesterday one of those seemingly unimportant hap- 
penings that change the current of a life came to me. 
I look up from the garden seat here among my flowers 
and my eyes journey from one accustomed sight to 
another. The long, low, rambling, gray old house 
drowsing in the mellow, low-lying sunshine, beyond it 
the path past the honeysuckle arbour that leads straight 
to the old-fashioned spring house, the colts in the pas- 
ture, the cattle at the bars — it is all so familiar that I 
smile at the words I have written. I am changed, not 
my life. 

Yesterday I walked up to Marsville, a mile away, 
for the mail, as I mostly do Saturday mornings, and 
Ellinor Baxter joined me. Ellinor is not a native 
Marsvillian either. Back in the dim past she came for 
the health of one of her family. Ellinor has always 
had musical yearnings, quite a little talent, too. She 
is the village musician and music teacher, and this 
year she has an assistant. The assistant is fresh from 
a bigger life: last winter she studied in Boston, and she 
has a friend who is doing wonderful things in Grand 
Opera abroad. It makes Ellinor quite tragic. Yester- 



20 WIND OF DESTINY 

day wlicn we reached the edge of the wood, and the 
mountain world lay about us like a vast picture, Ellinor 
flung out her arms as if to embrace all the several hun- 
dred peaks in sight and cried out: "Oh, how I hate that 
wall of mountains! If we could sweep it away we'd 
get a view, Caroline. We'd see what the world is doing. 
It's a prison wall. I can't escape. It seems that some 
hand of iron holds me here. If I had only gone eight 
years ago when mother's death gave me the freedom to 
go! Now I haven't the youth to make a new life for 
myself. Why don't you go? What holds you here?" 

"John, dear, good old John, I suppose," I answered 
slowly. 

Ellinor Baxter laughed scornfully. "John would be 
a less spoiled citizen without you. You are wasting 
the best years of your life. Soon you will be thirty." 

"I am thirty. This is my birthday." I said it defi- 
antly, because, uttered, it sounded so very, very ancient. 

Ellinor suddenly softened. "You look a young 
twenty-five. Some women begin to fade at twenty- 
five. Some mornings when you rush past to school 
you look eighteen 



"And her eyes are dark and humid, like the depth on depth of 
lustre. 

Hid i' the harebell, while her tresses, sunnier than the wildgrape 
cluvster. 

Gush in golden-tinted plenty " 



WIND OF DESTINY 21 

"Ellinor!" 

But Ellinor was in deadly earnest. Her eyes were 
full of tears. "Child," she said, "get away from here. 
Love, marry, fulfil your destiny." 

For just a moment I stopped and shut my eyes, 
pretending that a bner had caught my skirt. With 
shut eyes I knew that deep in the emerald world about 
me the black gum flaunted its crimson leaves — em- 
blem of change; that the corn in long, straight rows 
stood hardening in the ear; that the mountains, glis- 
tening chain on glistening chain, were shimmering in 
the morning light. Standing there, I saw more: 
October's pageant; November's dull, soft tones; the 
desolation and the grayness that is December moun- 
tains' dim forms seen through curtains of rain; January's 
white, white world — and then the surprise of a snow- 
drop, the warm, fragrant spring breath of the south wind 
shepherding flocks of snowy clouds. 

"I love it all," I said. And I spoke the truth. Since 
that August Sunday now a month past, since that 
earthquake upheaval, I have basked in peace. "I am 
busy. Most of the year I wake with just the thought 
of scrambling into my clothes, swallowing my breakfast, 
and getting to the schoolroom in time. When it is win- 
ter it is almost dark when T get home; when it is spring 
I have my flowers. And there's always John's clothes 
to mend and my own to make and " 



22 WIND OF DESTINY 

But with a gesture that was passionate ElHnor Baxter 
stopped me. "All this may satisfy at thirty, but it 
won't feed a woman's heart at forty. Then she feels 
the need of love — contact with a man's broader life. 
The monotony, the emptiness of life as she lives it 
alone tortures at forty. I know, for I am thirty-eight. 
And if she finds this out at forty it is mostly too late. 
Men pass us by for fresher faces." 

I did not know this new Ellinor Baxter who had 
lifted her mask and given me a peep at the real woman 
behind it, but for the first time in my life I loved her. 

As we turned into Main Street a big automobile 
was leaving the post-office. Mr. Black and his nice 
little wife — new people who are summering here — were 
in the tonneau. I hardly know how it came about, but 
in what seemed the twinkling of an eye Ellinor and I 
were in it, too. I did not understand where it was we 
were going, and when I tried to find out I swallowed so 
many buckets of air that I gave it up. But it was not 
of the slightest importance. All that had ever hap- 
pened to me was of slight importance. I was having 
my first automobile ride. We seemed to winnow the air 
like birds: to dip and dart down and around the curves, 
to soar up the hills with the flash and swiftness of wings. 
A dozen miles from our village we raced up a stately 
avenue and ran under a porte-cochere — our flight at end. 



WIND OF DESTINY 23 

The lady who came out to greet us was surrounded 
by dogs, big and little, aristocratic and plebeian, hand- 
some and hideous. After greeting her, Mrs. Black 
drew me forward and said: "Edna, this is Caroline 
Howard, who adores every word you write. Edna is 
my sister, Miss Howard." 

I draw a long breath of happiness at thought of yes- 
terday. I live it all over again. I feel sure it was no 
ordinary spark of liking that leaped between Edna Ken- 
nedy and me instantaneously and spontaneously. Wo 
had luncheon yesterday on a big wide veranda that 
overlooks a winding ribbon of a river from the view we 
had of it as calm and still as if frozen. After luncheon 
there was music: Geraldine Farrar in "Madam But- 
terfly" — and the story unfolded before me. I felt 
the anguish of that poor little waiting and trusting and 
praying wiie. Tetrazzini in the mad scene from "Lu- 
cia," and the flutelike voice going high and high and 
higher, till I bent forward in breathless suspense to 
drop back in my chair in content at that last marvel- 
lously dizzyingly high sweet bird note. Moved by a 
little burst of confidence I could not control, I told Edna 
Kennedy that I had never heard grand opera; that I 
had never been anywhere or seen anything. And then 
I told her of the thrilly little waves running up and down 
me that were fairly shouting it was the beginning and 
not the end of beautiful happenings to me — just as 



U WIND OF DESTINY 

though I had walked through a wood and come to a 
beautiful palace, and only stepped up on the portico 
with my hand still on the doorknob. I told her about 
Robert Haralson, too: what friends we were when I was 
little, before we came to live in the mountains. I was 
dreadfully disappointed that she does not know him. 
She says few people know him. She says he is shy; 
that he lives in his work — that the first night of the big 
play that is making him so rich and famous he ran 
away from the theatre afraid of the call that authors 
get to come before the curtain. As we were leaving, 
Edna Kennedy gathered some magazines from the 
library table and gave them to me. " He is in them all," 
she said. "Nobody in the literary and dramatic world 
is more in the public eye." 

I was very quiet coming home, and everything 
seemed little and mean and isolated and countrified 
when I got here. I went to my room immediately 
after supper. I said I was tired, but I was never less 
tired in my life. I read all the things the magazines 
said about Robert Haralson, and I looked long at 
the picture I found in one of them of my oldtime 
boy friend. I have not treasured any sentimental mem- 
ories of Bobby. I was little more than a child 
when I last saw him. It is true that the whole town 
teased Bobby about me — they called me his little 
sweetheart and accused him of robbing the cradle 



WIND OF DESTINY 25 

— but I have no treasured memories of him or of 
any man. 

I am indifferent to men, as Dicky says. Always I have 
turned with distaste from the thought of marriage. In 
that I think I am different from most women. There 
have been two — such nice splendid fellows I knew in 
my college life — who have penetrated my wilderness 
more times than one. And I? I like them. Life 
with either would seem to hold much that it withholds 
now. I have tried to yield, but I cannot; the thought 
of the nearness of what should be sweet and sacred to a 
woman brings a wave of physical nausea. For that 
reason I don't in the least understand what came over 
me last night as I gazed at a picture only dimly familiar 
to me. EUinor's words came back throbbing with their 
loneliness and hunger. I knew them to be true. I saw 
myself at forty rushing through breakfast and running 
the mile to school, pottering about the flowers, mend- 
ing the clothes — day after day, month after month, 
year after year spent in dull monotony — and my 
youth rolled away — my life. 

I did a strange thing — I, trained to chain my emo- 
tions as we chain wild beasts, in frantic haste I wrote 
to Bobby. It was not much of a letter — ^just : 

"Bobby, I wonder if the years have swept from your 
brain cells all memory of the little girl who used to 
live next door .5^ She'll never get to New York, never! 



26 WIND OF DESTINY 

There's a wall of mountains that she can't scale. But 
if ever you come to Marsville, whistle across the fence, 
won't you? The little girl's got one of your stories 
treasured in her desk without knowing until some one's 
letter gave away the secret of its authorship. Big 
congratulations, Bobby!" 

I went down to the yard and waked old Harris and 
paid him to walk to the railroad station, three miles 
across the gap, and mail it. Now it is late Sunday 
afternoon and it has been gone almost a whole day. 
But of course I will never have an answer to it. I am 
sure Mr. Robert Haralson keeps a female secretary who 
will scan it coldly and throw it in the waste basket. 

September 27th. 
Wednesday. 
I can't see how it got here in this marvellously short 
time, but I have Bobby's answer: 

80 Waverly Place^ 
September 25th. 
My Dear "Miss Carrie": 

Just once, if I may — and then I will try to think of 
you as Caroline. 

I was gladder to get your little note than the biggest 
editor's check I ever saw. Seems to me (after trying 
very hard) I do remember a small "sassy" girl that 
used to live next door. 

When you ask if I remember you, it reminds me of a 
story told of Congressman John Allen of Mississipi — 



WIND OF DESTINY 27 

(never could spell Mississip) — is that right? A lady 
approached him in Washington one day and held out 
her hand. "Now confess, Mr. Allen," she said, "that 
you've forgotten all about me." 

He had; he knew her face, but his memory wouldn't 
serve him any further. But, with a low bow, he re- 
plied: "Madam, I've made it the business of my life to 
try to forget you." 

See.^ — as we New Yorkers say. 

Well, well, how time does fly! as the little boy said 
when his teacher told him Rome was founded in 684 
B. c. I never expected anything so nice and jolly as 
to hear from you. It's like finding a five-dollar bill in 
an old vest pocket. 

Isn't it funny that I was thinking of you a little while 
last week? I had a map, looking all about on it trying 
to decide on somewhere to go for a few weeks to get 
away from the city. Mountains for me always! So 
my eye naturally ran down the Blue Ridge chain. 
Here's the latest picture of the distinguished Mr. 
Haralson. Does it look anything like the moonstruck 
little shrimp that used to hang around and bother you 
so much? I can remember what an awkward, bashful, 
sentimental, ugly, uninteresting nuisance I was then. 
No wonder I couldn't make any impression on you! 
I've improved a good deal since. In fact, it seems to 
me that the older I grow the better looking and more 
fascinating I become. Of course it doesn't seem just 
right for me to say so, but if I didn't tell you you 
mightn't ever find it out. 

In those days I took life mighty seriously and senti- 
mentally: that's why I always went about looking 
like a monkey with the toothache; but in after years I 
learned that life is only a jolly good comedy for the 
most part, and I began to enjoy it. I believe I'm about 
five years younger than I was the last time you saw me 



28 WIND OF DESTINY 

— when you left the depot in Roseboro for Marsville. 
Ernest Cold rode up with you on the train; and I 
haven't forgiven him for it yet. 

It's mighty nice of you to say you would be able to 
stand seeing me again if I should come to Marsville. 
I shore would love to ride up and holler "Hello!" over 
the fence. Lemme see! Trip to Europe — automo- 
biles — steam yacht — Rockefeller's money — no, none of 
those things sound half as good. But lawsy me! I 
don't know when I shall ever drap down your way. 

I've about decided to go up along the Maine coast 
fishing with an editor man. I live in a room or two as big 
as a barn on Waverly Place. I'm so lazy and cool and 
contented there all by myself with my books and things 
that I haven't been away from town in two summers. 

Now, I'm not going to talk about myself any more. 
I've been in New York about four years, and I guess 
I've *'made good," for everything I write is engaged 
long before it is written. 

I've been puzzling over your signature. It's the 
same old name you had when you wore your hair in a 
plait; and I have two very good reasons for thinking 
it ought to be different. One is that somebody wrote 
me several years ago that you had married; and the 
other is that it isn't possible — it isn't possible — that 
the young men of our old state could be so unappreci- 
ative as to have let you escape. But if you are mar- 
ried, please, oh, please get a divorce at once, so you can 
be "Miss Carrie" again. 

I am trusting to your good nature to accept a little 
book of mine that came out last winter. You don't 
have to read it, you know. It's just the thing to prop 
the kitchen door when the wind is in the east. 

And, Miss Carrie, some day when you ain't real busy 
won't you sit at your desk where you keep those anti- 
quated stories, and write to me.^* I'd be so pleased to 



WIND OF DESTINY 29 

hear something about what the years have done for 
you, and what you think about when the tree frogs be- 
gin to holler in the evenings. Got any tree frogs up 
there? 

Do this, and I'll promise to say "Caroline" next time. 

Let me say once more how good it was to hear from 
you, and that I am, yours sincerely, 

Robert Haralson. 

September 2Sth. 

The picture and the book have come. The picture 
is splendid. It dominates my room. 

Bobby was awfully fond of me. Lots of things I had 
forgotten come back as I look at the picture — the night 
he was allowed by mother after some hours of hard 
begging to take me to Commencement at the Female 
Seminary in old Roseboro and sat with his arm stretched 
on the back of the bench. I did not think it would be nice 
of me to ask him to remove it, and my back aches right 
now again at thought of the rigidity of my spine through 
the long hours of that female evening. You would not 
be guilty of such a ruralism now, Mr. Cosmopolite. 

I have written him. It is only polite to let him know 
that I appreciate the picture and the book. 

October 2d. 
Monday Afternoon. 
Bobby's letter was here this afternoon when I got 
in from school. Wasn't it marvellous that it could get 
here.f^ My eyes went straight to the table and I felt 



30 WIND OF DESTINY 

kind of queer and quivery all over when I saw the big 
square envelope with the bold handwriting that looked 
as familiar as if I had been getting his letters all my 
life. Here is his letter: 

New York, September SOth. 
My Dear Miss Carrie: 

Never thought you were going to stir up so much 
trouble when you did me that big favour of writing a 
"hello" to me across the mountains, did you? Well, 
please let me write this time, and if it's too much, give 
me the teeny-weenyest bit of a hint, and I'll turn my 
pen into a sword and cut it all out. 

Was it cheeky of you to write to me.'* My dear Miss 
Carrie, I don't know exactly what the unpardonable 
sin is, but if you hadn't written, I'd feel awfully anxious 
about yoiu- future. 

Right here let me assure you that I'm not one of these 
confirnied correspondents. Hand on my heart! I 
vow I haven't written two pages at a time to anybody 
in years and years. My closest friends complain that 
I don't even answer letters. But when I hear from — 
oh, you forbade that, didn't you. 

Don't chain up your impulses, dear friend; let *em 
skallyhoot around. We don't live more than nine 
times; and bottles and chains weren't made for people 
to confine and tie up their good impulses with. 

So you sliook your head when you read that I was 
thinking of you last week.? All right. Couldn't 
expect you to believe. But please turn to page 78 and 
page 131 of the book I sent you, and try to think whose 
eyes I attempted to describe. Since I saw you last 
I've seen only one pair of eyes like that; and they — well, 
they only rc.'tcmbled. 



WIND OF DESTINY 31 

Think I*m foolisli? Oh, no, I'm not. One can have 
an ideal if one wants to. I've liad one for — ^years. 
All I've had since have busted and gone up the flume. 
Please, Miss Carrie, lemme keep that one. I ain't 
going to bother you about it. You say those old days 
are laid away between lavender scented sheets. I can 
understand that for you. Mine are not. They are 
fresh and fragrant, dewy and everlasting. I'm not 
going to insist upon your believing it — shake your head 
if you want to and give the sun a chance to brigliten 
his rays. I'm superior to luck, fate, history, and time. 
If I choose to stand under a certain window yet in Rose- 
boro and sigh for the unattainable, no one shall balk 
me. So, don't you try to bulldoze me. Miss Caroline 
Howard. If my spirit elects to wander there, please 
you let it alone. 

Do you know that over there in the Ridge of blue and 
gold you are the most splendidly endowed of all the 
daughters of the gods? Why? Because my memory 
tells me that you have (to my memorial eye and mind) 
all that can be conferred of loveliness; and, according to 
your boast, you have a new and delectal)le way of fixing 
tomatoes. Now, I adore tomatters. I could die for 
'em, I nearly have several times. You can't imagine 
how interested I was in your tomato garden. In your 
tomato garden. Say — I believe you promulgated some 
nonsense in your letter about whether I stood under 
Fifth Avenue girls' windows about midnight and sent 
up flowers and candies. Why, lemme tell you. Miss 
Carrie, I've seen 'em and talked to 'em, and had tea 
with 'em — and lemme tell you — I'd rather set (not sit) 
across a little table with you and have a tomatter be- 
tween us with ice and 

Say — I don't agree with you about the nuts. Why, I 
never saw a tomatter in my life stuffed with nuts. Air 
they good? The ice sounds all right. And lemme tell 



32 WIND OF DESTINY 

you — I think you're wrong about the Mayonnaise 
dressing. I have such a respect for tomatters that I 
must challenge you. French dressing, with green 
peppers — so say I. 

And yet it is no more than Cosmic and Natural Jus- 
tice that you should be woozy about the proper way to 
fix tomatters. Perfection has never been attained by 
mortals. (Now my memory is at work again.) If 
you could be as I remember you and an expert in to- 
matters, too, why there would be double perfection, 
and that's an unknown quantity in mathematics. I 
prefer to retain my ideal; therefore the deduction is: 
your tomatters are off their trolley. Still, I'd like to 
try one. That's constancy and faith. Will you keep 
one on ice for me, on the chance that good Fortune may 
allow me to drift down that way? 

I sent up yesterday and got the Christmas Leslies. 
Why, I remembered that story, though I didn't recog- 
nize the name. It was very sweet and tender. I can 
see that you like kids. I congratulate you heartily 
on your work; I hope you will find it profitable and 
a blessing. You have unquestioned sympathy and a 
deep and true "humanness." You ought to come to 
New York, where you will be in medias res. There's 
nothing like being on the ground. You get artistic 
ideas and associations here that would be invaluable 
to you. Writing is a bully game. You want to know 
the dealers. I studied that fact out, and came here. 
To-day I get five times more per word than when I 
came. Sister of the pen and stamped-envelope-for- 
return, I speak wisdom to you. And here is life. 
Beautiful are the mountains and the moon silvering 
their tops; but here one learns the value of each upon 
each. And the moonlight of the mind is the most 
beautiful. Here art teaches Nature to conform. You 
could expand and rise here. I do not advise you, but 



WIND OF DESTINY 33 

I speak with wisdom of the markets and the heart. 
Pardon me if I am scornful of the Mayonnaise, and am 
dubious about the nuts. I could overlook a stab at 
my heart with a poniard, but — the tomattcr and I have 
been friends. Yet I could — may I try one the way you 
fix 'em? 

Wish I could have accepted your invitation to sail 
down on the big golden bubble of a moon, and drap 
under the cherry tree. Bet a dollar I'd have lit on the 
rake and the hoe you left there in the grass. Can't 
you ever remember to put 'em behind the door in the 
woodhouse when you are scratching around in the gar- 
den? I haven't ridden on the moon in a long time. It's 
on the full now, and I'm afraid I'd slide off. When it 
gets to look like a slice of canteloupe again, so I can 
hold on to the ends, I'll try to make that trip. Please 
spread an armful of hay and an old piece of carpet under 
the cherry tree so I won't come down with such a jolt 
when I jump off. Then I'd say something like this: 

"Miss Howard, please excuse my intrusion into your 
section of real estate devoted to domestic agriculture; 
but the object of my somewhat precipitous descent is to 
ascertain the identity of a certain youthful and pul- 
chritudinous being with whom at a considerably earlier 
period I sustained cognizance, and whose identification 
is relatively dependent upon a tonsorial arrangement in 
which her tresses retain the perpendicularity peculiar 
to juvenility at the time referred to." 

And you would answer: 

"Sir, regretting the futility of your rather incom- 
prehensible errand — which, had you been better versed 
in the more recent dictates of fashion, might have "been 
advantageously and indefinitely postponed — I must in- 
form you that none of the coiffures that are worn this 
summer allow any such primitive and adolescent ar- 
rangement of the capillary filaments as you refer to in 



34 WIND OF DESTINY 

your preamble; and therefore, as far as the little girl 
whose hair was in a plait is concerned, there is nothing: 
doing." 

I'll bet that's what'd happen to me. And then I'd 
have to go down to the road and sit on the fence and 
wait a month to catch the moon back. 

Miss Carrie, please, please send me that picture of 
yourself that you mentioned, or another one. If your 
heart hadn't been so hard and cruel you'd have en- 
closed it before instead of talking about it. How can 
you write those tender and kind little stories when 
really you are so unfeeling and stony hearted.'* You 
knew I wanted that picture. I'm going to tell all the 
editors I know that your work is a fraud — that you 
don't feel it at all. 

No doubt there isn't a single tear in your eye or the 
slightest thawing of your heart when I remind you that 
in another two weeks I shall be treading the pathless 
wilds of Maine. There in the dense tropical forest an 
infuriated porcupine may spring upon me from some 
lofty iceberg, or, becoming lost, I might perish in the 
snow of sunstroke. Think, Miss Carrie, what an ad 
it would be for you when the papers printed the news 
of a tourist found in the woods — an unknown man wear- 
ing tennis shoes and a woollen comforter, w ith 30 cents 
in his pocket, a frozen tomato in one hand, and a picture 
of the well-known and beautiful authoress C. H. in the 
other. It is no less than your duty to your publishers 
to try and get that ad. So, please send on the picture, 
will you.f* 

Sincerely yours, 

Robert Haralson. 



Is it because I live here on the edge of the world, 
outside of its activity, that I read Bobby's letter over 



WIND OF DESTINY 35 

and over? Is that the reason I search page 78 and page 
131 of the book? The eyes of Bobby's heroine are 
beautiful, and he says they are like mine. It was dear 
of him to remember the colour of my eyes through all 
these years. I couldn't have told the colour of his 
eyes. And I fibbed when I said those old memories 
were laid away in lavender scented sheets. That's 
the trouble with a spinster. She can be counted on to 
run to sentiment with or without encouragement. 

Oh, dear, I'm so tired. I want life different — not 
just to go in and eat supper and look over the lessons 
for to-morrow and read something and go to bed, as I 
have done all the nights of the past twelve Octobers 
and am likely to continue for the next several dozen of 
them. I fibbed when I wrote Bobby I had memories. 
I haven't. And I don't want memories — memories 
that sigh of age. I want joys that dance with youth. 
I want to sit at a little table and look across — not at 
John. 

October 6th. 

Friday. 
When I came home this afternoon there was my let- 
ter. I could have told Bobby that Marsville young 
women were hopelessly ancient at twenty-five, that 
nobody ever looked at them after they were thirty. 
Instead, I told him about the drummer who tried to 



36 WIND OF DESTINY 

flirt with me on the train. In my effort to get rid of 
him I moved all over the coach and finally took the 
last seat, to have him take the last seat opposite. I 
wrote Bobby that I thought of moving into the Pull- 
man, but that the trip was short and my economic 
soul balked at the suggestion. 
Bobbie answers : 

New York, October Uh. 

Dear Lady of the Unla vender Scented Memories: 

Please send that picture. You have moved to the 
very last seat in the car and I have picked up my traps 
and followed you. Will you send it, or are you going 
to move into the Pullman? 

Yours as ever, 

B. II. 

October 1th. 
Saturday. In tlie Garden. Sunset. 
I was up with the day this mornmg. At sunrise I 
had breakfasted and was in the lumbering old hack 
bumping over the miles that end with the trolley that 
carries us these days into our mountain city and metrop- 
olis twenty miles away from this little town. I went 
in to do my fall shopping, hat and coat suit and some 
other needed little things. There's a new woman's 
outfitter that has stimulated shopping marvellously. 
I saw some stunning things, and I bought — a white 
silk evening gown, very modern, very clinging, very 



WIND OF DESTINY 37 

beautiful. There's a cunning little fringe of crystal 
beads on the short sleeves. The dear little skimpy sash- 
ends have the crystal fringe, too. When I moved about 
in it and tried it on, the funny little waves of happiness 
ran up and down my spine and thrilled my knees just 
as if I really had my hand on the doorknob of that 
Magic Palace I first divined that day at Edna Ken- 
nedy's. Something pagan stirred in me with the 
tinkle of my barbaric finery. I bought white silk 
stockings and white satin slippers, too. I spent every 
penny of three months' hard work, and I borrowed my 
fare on the trolley from our butcher. If he had not 
been on I suppose I would have asked the conductor 
for a loan. The Bible says take no thought of the 
morrow. I did not. But to-morrow, when icy winds 
blow, with what shall I be clothed? I shan't worry 
now. It is too warm and lovely. If I should spend 
my winter in the state asylum, and I do seem headed 
that way, my old suit will be quite stylish enough. 

There are some La France roses blooming, as lovely 
ones as I have ever had. I get up from the garden seat 
and catch their pink satin faces to me and bury my face 
in their fragrant hearts. I whisper to them: "My poor 
foolish darlings, why do you bloom so late? Do you 
not know that all this wonderfulness of warmth, this 
semblance of summer, is a deception? Do you not 
know that winter is at hand? What is this absurd 



38 WIND OF DESTINY 

thing blooming in my heart as satiny pink and per- 
fumed as they? The amethyst hght has gone from the 
hills; gray and quiet they wrap their night robes of mist 
about them and wait for the morning. And the sky, 
still tender, waits for the stars. And I — for what do 
I wait? 

October Sth. 
Sunday. Garden. Sunset. 
The day has been hot. It has rained somewhere and 
there is a superb sunset display. It seems that all the 
golds and crimsons and purples in the world have been 
pounded and mixed in a vast mortar and flung in one 
magnificent wave of colour on the western sky. The 
mountains are wine drenched. The garden riots in 
colour. Everywhere colour, warmth, perfume. The 
glory fades, but the warmth remains. Oh, the moon! 
Big as a wagon wheel it wavers on the hill, hesitating 
about its plunge into space. I must go in. Mammy 
is calling me to supper. Yes, blessed old coloured lady, 
I am coming! Her eyes are dim. She could not have 
seen that it was my bedroom rug I put under the 
cherry tree. 

Midnight. 
Was it I who put the rug under the cherry tree? 
Was it I who crept down the stairs in such delicious 
stealth? And did it all happen just two hours ago when 



WIND OF DESTINY 39 

John's light went out? I had dressed in my tinkling 
finery, with my hair done hke hers on page 131, and 
I went down to see myself full length in the big old 
mirror brought from the childhood home. I did not 
mean to go outside, but the moonlight lay in silver 
splashes on the portico, and as I stepped into it it 
swept over me in one great delirious wave, not just 
ordinary moonlight — sorcery. Standing there in my 
shimmering gown and satin shoes, I lost all sense of the 
real me. Drawn by that compelling light that lay on 
the world beyond the door in a still white flood, I 
stepped into the fragrant night and sped to the big old 
cherry tree. No, not I — a red-lipped, shining-eyed, 
radiant young creature that bore only a physical re- 
semblance to me. Not a leaf dropped to fret the still- 
ness. Nothing stirred, and yet the whole world 
seemed afloat. I heard the gate's click as it opened. 
The man's soft felt hat was pulled down low on his 
brow, shading the features, but I knew him — that is, I 
divined who it was. Just for a moment I thought him 
a vision breathed into the night by its magic and my 
desire to have him there. Just for a moment the solid 
earth, the misty hills lost foundation. He did not see 
me so still in the shadow of the cherry tree. Halfway 
up the walk he stopped, perhaps with the realization 
that the house was dark, for I had blown out the lamp 
I carried down. He stood there very still. When he 



40 WIND OF DESTINY 

turned he walked rapidly down the walk and out the 
gate. I made a swift little rush from under the tree, a 
swift little rush that sent out a myriad of tiny sounds 
— that pagan thing in me alive, clamouring for its 
woman's birthright. I thinlv the gate's sharp click 
drowned the tinkling call of my finery. He did not 
glance back. After what seemed an aeon of time I 
heard voices — the faint roll of wheels. 

Perhaps I would think the whole fantastic thing a 
dream were it not for the wicked glitter of the baubles 
on my poor little frock that lies in a neglected heap 
there in the moonlight where I stepped out of it. 



October Wth. 
Twenty days since I wrote those last words — twenty 
warm, still, sun-drenched days as like one to another 
as peas in a pod. The oldest inliabitant fails to re- 
member such another October. But this morning, 
without the warning of a frost, it has come. The 
sun floods my desolated and blackened garden. It 
always hurts me to give up my flower children. I 
should hear only the pleasantest things at breakfast 
the morning of a freeze, but this morning after John 
had gone mammy brought my hot cakes in and told 
me that Lucius Blake was the author of a story that 
was spreading over the village like fire. Lucius said 



WIND OF DESTINY 41 

that he had driven the finest sort of a dude down to 
our house Sunday night, October 8th. Lucius said 
he came inside the gate, stood there Hke a stone, and 
that when he came back to the buggy he said: "I should 
have warned my friends of my arrival. I suspect 
from the darkened house that they are absent at 
Grand Opera." He then offered Lucius ten dollars 
to drive him to town, and they rode through the night 
in silence. I should think the silence would have killed 
Lucius, but he has lived to tell the tale. I am not in the 
least comforted that mammy, on the pretense that we 
need sugar, has hurried up to the village to tell every- 
body that Lucius is a liar — in the language of the moun- 
tains a master liar. I am not in the least comforted 
with anything. Fate, you are a cruel jade to let me 
put the light out, and I hate you. I have snatched the 
poor innocent-of-offence gown from its hanger, if it 
is innocent — I remember that night it twinlcled so 
wickedly — and I have flung it into the fire. I feel 
wildly happy that Bobby's book smoulders on it. 
But I have turned my eyes away as a wicked, yellow- 
ish-red, forked tongued flame leaps at the wavy 
lock of hair that always I know escapes Bobby's 
brushes because it likes to lie on his broad, thoughtful 
brow. 

How odd the room feels without the picture. I've 
got in the way of looking for the greeting from those 



42 WIND OF DESTINY 

watchful eyes, in the way of seeing the mocking smile 
on those pictured lips, the minute I open my door. No 
simple maiden in her charm for you, Mr. Robert Har- 
alson! Do I see you this minute motoring down your 
brilliant Avenue? And do I see her, the pride of your 
Avenue? Our uplands do not breed such exotics. 

November 15th. 
The days drift by like dull-hued birds. There's 
not a song in the throat of a single one. Dull-hued 
is the word, for the rains have washed the colour from 
the hills. And like a giant graystone prison wall the 
mountains, desolate, rattlesnaky things, stand against 
the sky. Jack the Giant Killer himself couldn't scale 
them. Mammy watches me anxiously. She says I 
am sick. I am — sick for a bigger life. Teaching 
is routine after twelve years. I haven't any worry. 
Dicky since her "Personal" escapade is being good, 
unless some mischief is brewing she has not yet got into 
trouble over. Some day — not this dull-eyed day — I 
mean to put to myself the question, "Why have you 
never said one word to Robert Haralson about Dicky 
— poor, cooped-up, lonely little Dicky?" And I mean 
to get an honest answer. 

Friday . December 2 1 st. 
The gods on Mount Olympus, if it be they that con- 
trol gray, heavy-lidded days like these, had compassion 



WIND OF DESTINY 43 

on me and let to-day be Friday. I'd have killed all the 
children in another day, and now I Iiave until Monday 
to get back to something akin to normal. I must have 
looked my mood when I came in, for poor old mammy 
had brought me hot toast and tea and delicious peach 
jam. I received it with gratitude, but when she began 
the recital of that well-known story in which she stood 
and received my great aunt's false teeth in her last 
hour, when she launched into my great uncle's handing 
them to her with the words, " Give these into the hands 
of this faithful servant," I leaped up so abruptly that 
I frightened her. I wonder if I really meant to pitch 
the dear, faithful old soul out the window? I am de- 
veloping temperament, or is it temper? Perhaps it is 
all due to the outside world. The snow sifts bleakly 
from a bleak sky. What am I to do with these walled- 
round-by-winter days? What am I to do with this 
woman whose outward appearance is mine? She ter- 
rifies me. For thirty years I've tended my little 
garden plot of life in placid content; cheerfully I've 
hoed my bean and cabbage rows. Now I want to 
dynamite these homely plants. Where the cabbages 
stand in rows I want red roses; I can't abide beans a 
minute longer, and in their stead I would like purple 
orchids. And there's something else I want: I want to 
cry and cry on a broad man shoulder — not John's 
shoulder. Half timidly I glance over my own shoulder 



44 WIND OF DESTINY 

as I write it. My own mother never kissed my father 
until after they were married, and my grandmother 
all her life long dressed and undressed behind the shelter 
of the door of the great wardrobe that is here in my 
room this very minute, but no reproachful ghosts are 
gazing at me. And if all the spinsters in this broad 
land with their battle cry of freedom and suffrage (I've 
got freedom and I'm willing for suffrage) had had the 
sort of day I've had with the children — it's been a wild 
beast of a day and its sharp claws have drawn blood — 
when twilight came they would do just what I am doing 
now. They would whisper into the firelit gloom which 
invites reckless confidences, as I am whispering, "Eve, 
Eve, you want your Paradise, don't you?" I do sol- 
emnly believe that soon or late this moment comes to 
every woman; I do solemnly believe that she can no 
more escape this dominant reaching out of her heart, 
this dominant yearning for that other one in the world 
of two outside of which the rest of humanity is ex- 
cluded. Since when have you believed this, Caroline 
Howard? Honest now. Face Dicky's letter — aren't 
you the daughter of a soldier? 

This time it's a big, blond yoimg German — a baron. 
A slight accident to his hand brought about the ac- 
quaintance. Always, Dicky "did" his hand for him. 
The acquaintance progressed to the point that he knew 
her afternoon off. "Of course," Dicky writes, "it 



WIND OF DESTINY 45 

flattered me to find him waiting outside the hospital — 
and with a taxi." 

It seems they had the gayest of drives, but when 
they turned in at the Pennsylvania Station Dicky 
demanded the meaning of it. The baron was ready 
with an answer. He told her that they were going 
away to an ideal life where they would always be to- 
gether and always alone. Dicky objected. Her pro- 
test was smothered in the depths of the baron's hat, 
flung quick as magic over her face. 

"How I ever emerged from the embrace of that hat 
with a smiling face I don't know. I must thank a 
year's training at the hospital for that. I came out 
game — cool on the outside, at any rate. I said: 'We 
can't go away together without baggage — think of the 
scandal of it.' From the depths of the cab he produced 
a big black bag. But I said, 'That won't help me.' It 
didn't work. He said in Washington we would buy 
enough clothes to last me forever. I fell in gayly with 
his plans. Inside the station he bought tickets to 
Washington. I tried to get near the ticket window, 
but he flanlced the move. There seemed to be no 
people in the station. The few that were there were 
miles apart in isolated little groups. Just before our 
train was called, standing together as alone as if we were 
already on the desert to which he said we would go when 
we left Washington, a stream of incoming people surged 



4G WIND OF DESTINY 

up from the left wing of the station. I felt sure one of 
the men was Bobby Haralson — he or his double. I 
asked the baron to let me say good-bye to an old friend, 
as we were never coming back. He agreed. 

'"Aren't you Mr. Haralson?' I gasped. 'If you are, 
don't you remember the little gypsy girl who answered 
yourad.'^' 

" 'Sure Mike, I do,' he said, and swung liis bag into 
his left hand and gave me a hearty right hand. My 
face must have shown that something was wrong, for 
he drew me out of the crowd, put down his travelling 
bag, and asked me, oh, so quietly, what was wrong. 
His quiet manner calmed me. As briefly as I could I 
told him. He grasped the situation in a lightning-like 
flash. 'Go back to him,' he said. *Keep cool. I'm 
on to the job.' Had I been on to my job I'd never have 
got in that cab. The morning paper says he's a baron 
all right. It says he's a lunatic all right, too. And he 
has been sent to a private asylum. 

"He took his arrest quietly. It was so unexpected 
it dazed him. I was so limp after it was all over that 
Bobby Haralson took me over to the Waldorf and made 
me drink a milk punch. Then he brought me home. 
We had a heavenly time, and I promised not to be 
naughty again. 

"At the door, he didn't come in; he said good-bye 
with that smile that lights and warms up his face — 



WIND OF DESTINY 47 

you remember I told you liow naicent and sort of im- 
personal he is — and he said next time I wanted an ad- 
venture just send out a wireless and he would answer. 
I didn't tell him about you, Caroline. You have tried 
so hard to make a hoyden into a lady that I did not 
reveal my identity." 

December Sth. 

What an odd, spoiled Bobby! I have a letter from 
him. Last fall — the afternoon I went to town and 
came back with the ill-fated gown — I sent him the 
picture. The P. M. (Particularly Mean) letter was the 
little note that demanded its return after we failed to 
meet in our promenade down in our yard. Bol^by 
expects an answer by return mail — it is in every con- 
fident line of his letter. Mr. Robert Haralson, spoiled 
darling of your town, once an old lady of my acquain- 
tance sent her husband across the mountain to get 
some "camfire" for her. The gum was dissolved in 
whiskey. He drank it and was very sick. I was pres- 
ent when, convalescent, he hum})ly asked for chicken 
soup. The old lady, with uplifted forefinger said, 
"Nary a chicken will ye git.'* 

See, Mr. Robert Haralson? as you New Yorkers say. 

Bobby's confident letter says: 

As I write, at my left hand is a basket of letters, j 
have just taken from the basket the last nice one you 



48 WIND OF DESTINY 

wrote me and the awfully mean one you wrote after- 
ward. The others run back a month or two and none 
are answered yet. My right arm is resting on a cush- 
ion, and I am writing with three fingers. 

I have been away. In my accumulated mail there 
were a couple of letters from you, and the photo you 
sent in the lot. The next morning after I got back I 
had to send for a doctor. I had got a knock on my 
blamed old elbow and she swelled up as big as a prize 
beet at the Roseboro County Fair. 

Well, old doc said it was cellulitis, which didn't sound 
very reassuring. It comes from having the cellular 
tissues hurt. And every day he done that arm up in 
plaster and eight miles of bandages. And three or four 
times he brung along his knives and lancets and was go- 
ing to carving at it, but I wouldn't let him. I haven't 
been able to write any more than a rabbit. I'm getting 
so I can use a small quantity of my fingers now, and 
this is the first answer to any letter in the basket. 

And that is why I haven't written to thank you for 
the photo, which I appreciate highly, and shall not 
return as you suggest in your P. M. (Particularly 
Mean) letter. What's the matter with it.^* It looks 
all right to me. I can't suggest any improvement in 
it. It has lots of your old expression in it, and although 
the fool photographer did all he could to spoil it by 
making you turn your head as if you were looking to see 
if your dress was buttoned all down the back, it's a 
ripping nice picture, and you needn't want to be "any 
better to look at than the picture." (Can't you say 
the mean things when you want to!) 

Now, I wish you'd behave, and take your finger out 
of your mouth and stand right there — turn your toes 
out — and say you are sorry. 

Lemme see! — there was another dig — oh, yes — if I 
*'had been a pauper or a millionaire." 



WIND OF DESTINY 49 

You bet I'm a pauper now. Miss Carrie. Bio wed all 
my money in on my trip, and ain't made any to speak 
of since except what doc would carry away with him 
every day. 

Getting along all right again, though, now. How's 
your writing coming on? 

Now will you shake hands again, although it's my left 
one this time? 

Yours as ever, R. H. 



December Wth. 
I have another letter from Bobby. And I didn't 
answer his last letter. As I read it a wicked little joy 
steals in on me and grows and grows. 



New York^ December 18th. 
My Dear Miss Carrie: 

Now get mad if you want to, but couldn't you agree 
to let somebody call you that? (Bobby has scratched 
out the "Miss.") That's the way I think of you, and 
if you insist on being called by your golf and automo- 
bile name of Carrie, why, tear up this letter and throw it 
out the kitchen window over the cliff. 

Why didn't you answer my last letter? Rowing on 
the lake, I suppose, with the gent that comes to see you. 
I hope the lake will freeze. And I hope the gent — 
won't freeze. So, there ! 

I am looking over your last letter to-night, and it's 
like the breath of a spring wind through a laurel 
thicket. I'm going to take it page by page and an- 
swer it. 

The first page contains a quotation from a letter to 
you from an insect known as a "literary agent." Dear 



50 WIND OF DESTINY 

Carrie, listen to the chirp of the crickets on the moun- 
tain, but don't pay any attention to the noise of that 
tribe. I am fortunate enough not to know this par- 
ticular duller tliat has written such "pifHe" (as they 
say in Chicago), but I've heard about him — and you 
cut him out. He's an insufferable, measly kid, at the 
Sweet Caporal cigarette age, and his graft is to stuff 
you provincial writers (I'm speaking impersonally now) 
with his taft'y so he can get your stuff to peddle around. 
Don't you believe his trick; and you quit sending him 
your stuff. He's trying to make you think you've 
got George Eliot and Mrs. Iliunphry Ward beat to a 
batter, when you know yourself it ain't so. Isn't that 
a sage, oh, what a wonderfully sage remark when he 
says "you must write your best!" 

Don't you believe "that the editors are asking about 
you constantly, and are more than anxious to see your 
work." It's not so. 

Now get mad again, and when that oldtime smile 
comes back, read on further. 

Mein Gott! what a recollection you have of me! 
"A tall, slender lad with nice eyes — awfully quiet, 

and Oh, I'll admit the exceedinglj'- fond." Was 

it a mystery why? Well, I dunno, except because you 
were so sweet and devilish. 

To-day I am as slender as anybody five feet eight 
and weighing 175 pounds could be, and I've sharp, 
mean eyes. (I told Bobby that he had nice eyes because 
I couldn't remember the colour.) I've been taken for 
a detective lots of times, but I haven't changed so 
much inside, and if you were on the twentieth floor of 
the Waldorf-Astoria to-night, and had a string long 
enough, I'll bet I'd have a magnolia or two and a box 
of candy to tie to the end of it. 

You speak of meeting old Tom in your letter. Well, 
just a few days afterward I got a letter from him talking 



WIND OF DESTINY 51 

about old days. Said he'd been in New York often 
and might be back. Lordy ! I'd Hke to see him again. 
(Back in the old days at Roseboro Tom was one of the 
whistlers under my window the night I got the mag- 
nolias.) 

Well, now, Carrie, what do you care if Tom pays at- 
tention to somebody and likes her.f^ Ain't that the 
only thing there is that's worth two cents .^ Doesn't 
the gentleman that takes you out driving and boat 
riding ever — ever — talk about how nice the moon looks .f* 
Oh, Carrie, never get so you feel like running down such 
foolishness. After everything is added and subtracted, 
that is the only remainder. 

On the next page I find the very wise remark of your 
friend Miss Baxter (whom I would be glad to consider 
mine — I mean mein f reund !) that you can't write a love 
story because you know nothing about it. Miss Baxter 
is altogether wrong but none the less charming. That 
led me to inclose you a little story of mine — a thing that 
is apparently egotistical to do — that settles the question 
beyond all controversy. Read it some time when you 
are up in the arbour about twilight when they are call- 
ing you to supper — but don't go. 

On page three of your letter I observe a reference to 
your picture. Sure, Mike! I asked you for your 
picture. And I've got it, ain't I? I'd like to see you 
get it back ! 

Oh, Carrie, if you "knowed" how folks try to get 
letters from me and can't, you'd appreciate the delight- 
ful toil I take in writing to you. Ordinarily it's just 
like laying bricks for me to write even a business letter, 
but when I write to you — lemme see what to say — it's 
like lifting the lightest feather from the breast of an 
eider duck and watching it float through the circumam- 
bient atmosphere. (That strike you hard enough?) 

I'll tell you what, Carrie — (now don't get mad. 



52 WIND OF DESTINY 

Caroline) I need a boss. For the last month I*ve been 
so no-account and lazy that I haven't turned out a 
line. And yet, I don't think it's exactly my fault. 
I've felt kind of melancholy and dreamy and lonesome, 
and I don't sleep well of nights. Once I dreamed that 
I had a magnolia for you and you tm-ned up your nose 
at it and went away with Jeff — you remember JeflF.^^ 

Everybody's Magazine sent down the editor's automo- 
bile and took me uptown to a distinguished nerve 
specialist, who decided that I had been working too 
hard, and advised me either to take a trip to Europe 
or some tablets he had in a box. I took the tablets. 
They didn't taste bad, so I kept on taking 'em, and I 
ain't a bit worse to-day. 

But none of 'em knew that what I needed was just 
somebody to fix a cushion for me on the sofa, and tell 
the man with the gas bill that I wasn't in. 

You asked me what I get for short stories. I get 
ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty cents a word, and every- 
thing engaged long before it's written. 

Now, I'll tell 3'ou what to do: kick the mountains 
over and hurry to New York. It's 50 per cent, of the 
game to see the editors in person. Right here is the 
only place on the American Continent where you can 
live. What are the mountains compared to it? Dear 
Carrie, kick the mountains over and take my advice. 
You are far enough advanced to make your way from 
the start. And I assure you, as I said, being on the 
ground is 50 per cent of the game. 

They call it a lonely city. Lonely! with every mas- 
terpiece of art, music, and beautiful things within a 
block of you! Say, Carrie, chop down the tomato 
vines and come on. I can get you into every editorial 
office in town (where you are not already appreciated), 
and you will make a success. Attend, oh, Princess of 
the Bluest Ridge, these are not the words of one D. 



WIND OF DESTINY 53 

Hudson the adolescent, but of Bob tlie Perspicacious, 
who has seen and who knows. If I didn't think you 
had the genius to win the game I'd never advise you to 
try. 

There's a hne in your letter — "I couldn't know what 
the boy had developed into." I can only say into one 
surely no better, unsatisfied, and always remembering 
the little girl next door. 

Please, Carrie, write to me soon, and if you don't 
like my letter say you condone it, for there ain't nobody 
up here like you, and I'm awfully lonesome to-night. 
And so, may I sign myself. 

Yours as ever, Bon. 

P.S. I'm awfully glad to see by the weather reports 
that there's a freeze coming. I hope the gent that 
rows you on the lake will have to buy tacks to put in 
his oars. 

P.P.S. I was in a thanksgiving party where we had 
a flashlight photo taken. I'll send you one when they 
are printed. 

Do I condone Bobby's letter? The wicked, contra- 
band little joy grows and grows. 

Christmas Eve. 
Midnight. 
It is snowing — a real snow. The night outside my 
windows is one soft whirling blur. At dusk John came 
in from the twenty-mile-away town. He shook the 
snow from his clothes like the traditional Santa Claus, 
and he was just as full of bundles. Two express pack- 
ages for me in the big, bold hand grown so familiar 



54 WIND OF DESTINY 

set my heart to beating and my cheeks to blushing 
furiously under John's scalpel eyes. 

Since nine o'clock, when John went to bed tired out 
with his hard day's journey, I have sat here in my bed- 
room, dim save for the light of the leaping flames and 
silent save for the sift of the snow piling high and higher 
on the window-panes. Luxuriously I dive again into 
the most wonderful box of candy I ever dreamed of; 
luxuriously I sniff the perfume of the most exquisite 
flowers I ever saw, across the snow-filled air the village 
bells ring their faint, "Peace on earth, good-will to 
men." 

To-morrow when I wear my flowers to church, I'll 
feel like a princess — orchids and lilies of the valley — 
your princess, Bobby. 

Christmas Day. Afternoon. 
When my eyes opened this morning the flaming 
beauty of the east took me to the window — ^such a 
marshalling of sunrise banners to do honour to the 
day. Not waiting for my fire, judging from the sounds 
in that direction that mammy was having a holiday 
nap, anyway, I dressed rapidly, high shoes, short skirt, 
coat and cap, and sallied forth. The landscape stretched 
before me like a vast white sea, its purity unbroken by 
footstep of man. It seemed to belong solely to me and 
a few noisy crows. I marched straight to the post-oflfice. 



WIND OF DESTINY 55 

It was closed when John passed last night. I had a 
sneaking little hope — but it wasn't there. I got a little 
note from Dicky, though. She writes that her gift is 
delayed. It is always. I could never teach Dicky 
timeliness — always, like Bobby Haralson, she has been 
superior to time. 

The day that I began joyously has been a restless 
one. I have climbed to the hilltop. Below me the 
village lies, a crystal toy town in the lap of crystal 
hills. My eyes travel down the chain of glistening 
hills to Camel Back. Wise old comrade, I do believe 
he knows. Anyway, it is a relief to tell him. " Camel 
Back," she writes, "A chance encounter at the theatre 
with Bobby Haralson in which I still conceal my iden- 
tity." Camel Back's snowy hump twinkles as though 
he laughs; above him the clouds that have seemed to 
drift aimlessly form a fairy castle. Its turrets and dome 
glitter in the sunset's dying fire. I can trace a door — 
a vast, closed portal. How ridiculous that a trick of 
the clouds could thrill me! Slowly the door has op- 
ened. I can't explain the lovely magic of it, but there 
in the white stillness some words that Bobby wrote 
rolled over me in a great, mounting, singing wave. 

"You have sympathy and a deep and true human- 
ness." If Bobby is not mistaken! If it could be! Al- 
most solemnly I turn from my mountain, with its castle 
fading from the sky, and take my way home. 



56 WIND OF DESTINY 

January 20t7t. 

Every minute that I can spare from my school duties 
I work at my book in a fury of enthusiasm. Just as 
the snow made the village so beautiful on Christmas 
day, something within me no longer sees the frailties 
of the mountain people with whom my lot is cast. 
Their kindness through all the long years comes to me 
instead. So I call my little book "The Window." I 
look out and see beauties I never saw before, and the 
sun pours in and warms me. 

January 25th. 

I am working at it night and day. It grows amaz- 
ingly. " Child," some one said to me yesterday, " I heard 
ye was writin' a book. Ain't plenty o' books in the worl', 
'thout rackin' yore pore brains to write anuther?" 

Almost, I gave back indignant answer; but I have 
learned of my little book — of my little book that flows 
in my veins and runs down through my finger-tips, 
sometimes to laugh and exult, sometimes to sob and 
sigh. 

February 15th, 

My book is written. It was pure joy. It is very 
simple — just the hopes and fears, the joys and sorrows 
of this spot isolated from the big world by its wall of 
mountains. I owe much to my book. Winter still 
holds the world, but flowers bloom inside me. Not the 
orchids and roses I demanded of life when I wanted to 



WIND OF DESTINY 57 

dynamite my garden plot, it is true, but some old- 
fashioned pinks that make these February days sweet 
and smelly ones. 

March 1st, 

Did it ever happen to anybody before? I have 
knocked and knocked at editors' doors; I have waited 
months and got my stories back, too. Two weeks, 
and I hold in my hand a telegram from Bobby's pub- 
lishers: "Your little book is ours, and it's love at first 
sight." 

April 1st. 

It is advertised in the magazine section of the Times. 
How it flashes out to meet my eyes: "The Window" 
— a certain simplicity of expression — a realism that 
touches with delicacy and pathos things that we feel 
are the actualities of life. 

John comes in and brings Dicky's letter: "Caroline 
Howard ! And not to tell me ! Such a peach of a hero- 
ine, Caroline. How'd a sedate old thing like you catch 
that spirit of youth.? Your heroine flames like a red, 
red rose. And what do you know of love's sweetness 
and its fierceness.'^" 

What do I know? I go indoors and gaze soberly at 
the sedate old thing that is I. Then I go in search of 
mammy. "Mammy," I call, "I must have somebody 
to talk to. They say you can look right into the 
shadowy interiors of the mountaineers' cabins; that 



58 WIND OF DESTINY 

you can see the vague objects take shape in them be- 
cause I've got the atmosphere so well." Mammy is 
feeding the chickens. "What is atmosphere, honey .f^" 
she asks calmly. "Oh, feed your chickens," I say, 
disgustedly, and, calmly, she obeys. 

By some queer trick our publishers, Bobby's and 
mine, have put us together — my little book by his big 
book. I have not heard from Bobby since Christmas. 
No doubt all his fingers are now out of commission. 

Just after Christmas I was in town and I saw a big 
splendid picture of Bobby in a bookdealer's window. 
I know the man, and, shamelessly, I told him Bobby 
was my first cousin — my favourite cousin. He gave 
me the picture. Bobby is in his old place on my 
mantel. And, as before, he dominates the room. 
There are times when I almost feel his presence, dis- 
tinct, encompassing. My life has not many idle mo- 
ments, but when these little lazy let-down minutes do 
come, when I sit by the fire at night, the school papers 
all corrected, just before I go to bed, I find awaiting 
me, giving me the feeling that it is always there, pa- 
tiently abiding its moment, this nearness to Bobby. 
It draws near, not like an alien thing unsure of its wel- 
come, but it comes as if in answer to a call. How well 
I know Bobby Haralson ! Times spent together, when 
apart, how close they come. If disaster overwhelmed 
him he'd hide his hurt under a froth of gayety, his lips 



WIND OF DESTINY 59 

would mock with smiles. Once my mother laughingly 
called my father to see the pretty picture a little sewing 
girl made as she slept — her beads of prayer in her 
hands. Smilingly my father shook his head. My 
mother loved my father for that chivalry to a little 
sleeping work girl. Bobby is like that — human enough 
to advertise through a newspaper for a girl "pal" and 
then too chivalrous to meet her. The subtle gradations 
that make a gentleman ! 

April 1st. 

All the way from school this afternoon I kept telling 
myself there would be a letter from Bobby on the hall 
table, and then I would tell myself it was preposterous 
after this long silence that I should look for his letter. 
But there it was. And he has been sick. I feel his 
nerves in the letter. 

If Bobby has been reading my last two letters, which 
he hopes I won't make my two last, one was most cer- 
tainly an old one. Of course I thanked him for the 
Christmas flowers and candy. It's a bad sign, Mr. 
Book-writer, for a man to con over old letters. He's 
either in his dotage, or he is in love. Is Bobby in love? 
Here's his letter: 

West Wth Street, 

New York. April 1st. 
Dear, dear Carrie: 

(Dear, dear Carrie, indeed ! And not a line from him 
since Christmas.) 



60 WIND OF DESTINY 

Here's my right hand being held up: — Please listen! 

To-day for tlie first time in six weeks I've had my 
trunks unpacked and have sat down at my desk clothed 
in my ordinarily sane mind, and been able to find pen 
'n ink 'n paper to write with and on. I've moved four 
times since I lived in Waverly Place; and have been 
driven from post-office to pillow by the — noise of ele- 
vated trains, waggons (notice the English two g's), trams 
(also English), and cries of hucksters (mostly Dagoes). 
At last I have found a quiet haven; and the first 
thing I do (of course) is to dig your last two (please 
don't make it "two last") letters and read 'em some 
more. 

I have answered your letters and written you dozens 
in the spirit; but when it comes to spreading the ink, I 
know I've been as the old darky song goes, *' A liar and 
a conjurer, too." There are periods of time when the 
sight of a pen or an ink bottle strikes me to stone. Will 
it be some slight excuse for not having written to one 
of whom I have tliought by every mail, if I assert that 
not for months have I written a line for publication 
except one little short 2,000-word rotte7i story? It be 
true. 

Oh, some sort of nervous condition — can't sleep nor 
nothin'! Oh, yes, ma'am, thank you; feelin' heaps 
better now. I live within a few doors of Broadway, but 
on such a quiet street that the little clock on my desk 
ticking sounds as loud as a cricket chirping under the 
honeysuckle vine on your porch on a fall night. 

Don't you think you might come up this way some 
tlme.'^ Ain't there some of your folks that live around 
here.'^ Seems to me there was. I'd rather see you than 
to have a bushel of diamonds. And if I can get a 
string on you I'll tie more magnolias and gumdrops to 
it than Roseboro ever saw. Say — please come, won't 
you? I do so long to see a human — a Heaven-sent, 



WIND OF DESTINY 61 

home-bred, ideal-owning, scrumptious, sweet, whole- 
some human with a heart such as I know you are — or, 
in the words of the poet, "one of whom you are which.'* 
The folks up here are all right and lots of 'em are good 
to know, but — they ain't got tar on their heels. Miss 
Carrie, ma'am. 

I've been tliinking of running down to the Bluest 
Ridge for two or three weeks as soon as it gets warmer 
here. I want to go up somewhere in the mountings 
and have a quiet time with the sunrises and the squir- 
rels, and I want to see some morning glories on a board 
fence. I've tried the dinky little hills they call moun- 
tains up here, and they ain't no good. You can't take 
forty steps in the wildwood without stumbling over a 
sardine box or a salmon can; and the quantity of Ikcys 
and Rebeccas that you scare up in the shady dells is 
sure something fierce. 

If I happen down in your range of mountings may I 
drop in and see you? I need to get away from town for 
a while, and I certainly would rather be there than any- 
where I know of. 

Why don't you cut loose and come to N. Y.^ This is 
the only place to live. You can choose the kind of life 
you want and live it, and get all there is of existence. 
Come on and get in with the bunch! You can get a 
studio in a top story and raise tomatters on the roof if 
you must have 'em. I'll help you tend to 'em. Come 
on and learn the beauty of a quiet life. Get away from 
the feverish round of gayeties that you've been accus- 
tomed to — men taking you out rowing (wasn't he tall 
and dark, with a drooping moustache?) and men coming 
in the Pullman cars and sitting close by your side — 
oh, I haven't forgotten about it! Often I've gotten 
out a couple of dozen sheets of paper and started to 
write to you, when I'd think: oh, what's the use — she 
won't want to hear from me — somebody's ripping the 



62 WIND or DESTINY 

buttonholes out of his collar trying to pull up car win- 
dows for her, or pulling on the wrong oar and rowing 
the boat into a mud bank where they'll sit for hours 
until some plowman plods along and drags them out. 

Please, dear Carrie, write to me some more. If you 
had saved all the letters I've written to you in the 
spirit you'd have a stack as high as the big sunflower 
by the garden gate. Write and tell me exactly what 
you think about when you take your hair down and sit 
on the rug at 11:30 p. m. before the fireplace. And I'll 
tell you what I think about when I set the bottle of 
Scotch on the table and light the last cigar at 2 a. m., 
when the distant cars and cabs sound like the ripples of 
your mountain streams on a still summer night. 

I send the ghost of a magnolia up to your window. 
Yours as ever. Bob. 



April Uh, 
I find a P.S. from Bobby this afternoon and the 
ghost of a magnolia that failed to get in the other 
letter. 



Ma Cherie Mlle. Carrie: 

Here's a magnolia. 

I know you believe I am "without the pale" and 
"N. G.," but I write again because I do not believe 
that I am. 

If you come to N. Y. this spring I reckon as how you 
won't want to see me because you think I am short on 
etiquette. All right for youse! I'll watch all the 
rubberneck coaches, and when I see a little pink- 
cheeked girl in a straw hat with daisies on it and a white 
dress with a pink sash, chewing sweetgum — (for shame, 



WIND OF DESTINY 63 

Bobby) — and making eyes at tlie Brooklyn Bridge, I'll 
know who it is, and look at you all I please. 

So, au revoir. Miss Howard. I am still yours sin- 
cerely. 

R. H. 



April 5th. 
This sweet spring afternoon I cannot stay indoors. 
In her joy the earth is like the mother of a new-born 
child. A light, restless wind has piled snowy, errant 
clouds above the mountain tops, the little green leaves 
are uncurling, the sun shining as it shines only in the 

spring and on an awakened world — and the birds 

A lover bird, just the kind to capture a little lady bird's 
heart, has been pouring out a passionate mating song 
for two whole days. He is in the cedar tree not far 
from my window. His little lady love answers from 
the willow in the pasture. Hs is trying to make her 
come to him, I feel sure. Will she? 

April Qth. 
Saturday Afternoon. 
My lover bird is gone from the cedar tree. Down in 
the willow's cool depths, above the spring where the 
colts and cattle drink, there are such flutterings, such 
joyous little outbursts of song that I smile in sympathy. 
Wise, wise, little woman-bird. Since the coming of 
these last letters there's been a stealthy fear following 



64 WIND OF DESTINY 

at my heels — the fear that I might go to New York. 
I could make my book an excuse, and I have some 
money. I have spent very little since that extravagant 
outburst last fall. And I could make Dicky an excuse. 
Dear little Dicky, who is as joyous over my book as if 
she herself had written it. 

I will not go ! The fate that let me put the light out 
the night that Bobby came here is a wicked, wicked 
jade, but I defy her ! I'll stay right here ! 

That Bobby should remember a little girl's hat 
through all the years! That day so far in the past, 
when I left Roseboro and Ernest Cold was on the train 
— Bobby said he was; I don't remember — Bobby put 
a real daisy in my hat band when he came in the train 
to tell me good-bye, and he said 

That stealthy fear that I might go to New York is 
stealthy no longer. Boldly it has stalked out in front 
of me and clutched me by the throat. 

April 15th. 
This morning when I pushed up the shade in my 
berth I was greeted by the sun's big, round, inquiring 
eye. "What are you doing here.^^" he seemed to be 
asking. I hastened to explain that my going to New 
York was in no way connected with Mr. Robert Har- 
alson; that he is not to know I am there. Somewhat 
shamefacedly I explain to that red, watchful eye that 



WIND OF DESTINY 65 

Dicky is not to know I am there either. Dicky doesn't 
need me now. Her last letter is as joyous as the lilt of 
a lark. 

My publishers (how fine it sounds) want some little 
changes made in the book, and for that sole reason I 
am on a Pullman bound for New York. 

So accustomed am I to space that I could not be 
boxed up in lower twelve last night, so I took the whole 
section. This morning as I stood on my bed reaching 
up for my skirt the train took a sharp curve that landed 
me in the aisle of the car. Visions of a hospital danced 
with a million stars before my eyes. A young, lovely 
girl helped me back into my berth. No one else, not 
even the porter, had witnessed my humiliation. In a 
little while, in spite of my aching head, I collected my 
senses sufficiently to get to the dressing-room. Making 
myself presentable was a clutching sort of experience. 
I have not spent the night in a train since I was eigh- 
teen, and I must have been more agile then. When I 
emerged from dressing I felt as a mountaineer's baby 
must feel when it is being hushed to sleep. If you have 
ever seen one being flung from side to side of its rude 
little cradle, threshed about like a weaver's shuttle, 
then you understand perfectly. 

The girl was waiting for me; she proposed that we 
breakfast together. In the dining car, under the stim- 
ulus of the coffee, which stopped my headache, I told 



66 WIND OF DESTINY 

the girl about my little book and that I was going on 
for my first trip. Back in the coach we were the only 
passengers and we sat together; she told me about her- 
self. She is going to New York, too. She is going to 
join the great army of workers. She is so sweet and 
young, so girlish and refined, so beautifully although 
simply dressed, that I think my face must have shown 
my astonishment and regret. That she should be 
adrift in a great city seemed too dreadful — one of its 
labourers, and on small wages, in desolate lodgings, 
isolated from all social life with her kind. I thought of 
the city's temptations for a lonely, beautiful girl. And 
I said: "Child, go back to your family. Haven't you 
somebody .f^" 

"I have my little baby that lies in the cemetery." 
Her young laugh rang bitter. *'I am all alone. I left 
my husband — he didn't love baby and me any longer. 
I mean he didn't love me. He adored baby. She 
adored him, too. She used to say, 'I'm des trazy 'bout 
my dear daddy.'" She looked from the window; I 
could see her chin quiver. When she turned back to 
me her voice was quite steady. "I want to be fair 
to him. When baby died it hurt him cruelly, and al- 
ways when I place flowers in the little urn at the head of 
baby's grave, I find beautiful ones in the urn at the 
foot. I know, although he does not love me any longer, 
that it hurts him for me to be a waffe-earner. But I 



WIND OF DESTINY 67 

can't take his money. You — you don't believe in 
divorce? " Her voice was half timid. 

I was silent. It is something I am so ignorant of. 
The old Ducketts are the nearest approach to divorce 
that we have in our mountain world. Recently, with- 
out a word to any one, that poor old lady left her home 
and moved to a little house across the street. Our 
village has wondered and gossiped about this rupture 
after sixty years of life together. Poor old lady, she 
slips in the back door of his house when he is sitting 
at the front door, and does up the work she has done for 
sixty years; then she slips home again. 

**A woman can't judge" — the girl's voice with a de- 
fiant note in it brought my thoughts with a start back 
from the Ducketts, and to her — "unless it is her own 
problem. She, the other woman, wanted him to leave 
baby and me. He dropped the letter on the floor and 
I picked it up and read it. I don't know why I did it. 
I had perfect faith in him. She said all her happiness 
was at stake; she eliminated our happiness — baby's 
and mine." 

"But, child" — my mind took a wider circle than it 
had ever had need of in Marsville — "any woman might 
fall in love with another woman's husband and try to 
take him from her. I know a coloured woman whose 
husband beats her, and when I try to make her leave 
him and live on a nice little place we have and do 



68 WIND OF DESTINY 

our washing, she says she would leave her old man 
but that she might not find another, that husbands 
is so *scase.' They must be from the way some 
women behave. Perhaps your husband was not at 
fault." 

The lovely colour mounted to her face, it quivered 
as she told me that he had acknowledged it. We were 
both silent then. But presently I asked if he had gone 
to the other woman. She murmured no. 

"He says that he is penitent." Her eyes were 
stormy. " He begs me to take him back. Upon what 
foundation would I build my faith in him again?" 

I think my own answer surprised me. "Bodies 
sometimes sin when souls are clean," I said. "It 
could have been a passing sin of the body that did not 
touch the spirit, which is still true to you. If the spirit 
sinned he would not want to come back — he would not 
be sorry. Oh, child, don't you see? " 

"I never — did see — it like — that." The girFs words 
trailed like broken winged birds, her face paled. 

We were under the shed in Washington and a soli- 
tary passenger, travelling bag in hand, was coming 
down the aisle of our coach. At sight of her, for he did 
not know me, his face whitened, too. In one great 
throb of my heart I took in the situation. I knew that 
he was her husband, and that he loved her. I saw it 
in the flash of his face at sight of her — a blind man given 



WIND OF DESTINY 69 

back his sight might look out on his restored world 
with a look like that. 

In a lightning-like flash of time I had leaped to my 
feet, pushed him into the seat where I had been, and, 
without in the least knowing what I was saying, I 
heard myself say: "You foolish children. Go back to 
the little grave and put the two urns for flowers to- 
gether. Then start life all over again." 

I left them staring into each other's eyes in a sort of 
mesmerized trance, and went into the next coach. 
When my eyes cleared of tears I saw that the bright 
sunlight world beyond the car window was filled with 
yellow butterflies. In their circling they made a great 
golden wedding ring. The sweet prophecy seemed 
mine — not belonging to the people I had left back in 
the other coach. At lunch they asked me to come to 
their table, but I smilingly refused. When two people 
have just been caught up in a golden chariot and given 
passage direct to Paradise there is no room in the 
vehicle for outsiders. 

I could not grind under the river and get out in the 
heart of the city, as the advertisements say. I had 
to see the skyline from the Jersey side. How wonder- 
ful It is as it glitters in the soft spring light — a proud 
wonder city that rests on great, tossing waters. And 
there lie the docks. I can read the names of the differ- 
ent lines on the dark little houses. And far down the 



70 WIND OF DESTINY 

stretch of moving water I see a gallant little tug assist- 
ing a great vessel out to sea. A sort of trembling seized 
me. Like a vision that fades, all thought of the life 
that lay behind me — ^John, mammy, the little mountain 
village — slipped away. As the boat drifts near and 
nearer to that white wonder city I want to fling the 
people huddled on the seats, apathetic as sheep, into 
the water. I want to cry aloud, *'City, city, I am 
coming!" But they wake up at the dock. How alive 
they are! I am alive, too. I am over the mountain 
wall. At last I am part of the big, alive, throbbing 
world. 

April Wth. 12 p. M. 
Late yesterday afternoon when I ran up the steps of 
30 West Twentieth Street and the door opened and 
closed on me, my one sensation was relief. I had 
taken a cab at the ferry and I had marvelled at the 
dexterity with which the cabby turned and twisted 
through the dingy streets. Safe, not kidnapped, money 
still in my bag, the wonderful adventure of getting to my 
destination without adventure accomplished, I stepped 
from that cab. The cabby took my trunk from the top 
of his hansom, banged it on the sidewalk, accepted the 
dollar we had agreed upon, and waited. I waited, too, 
politely. Suddenly he turned very red and climbed to 
his perch, swearing roundly. 



WIND OF DESTINY 71 

As I followed Miss Jackson up the stairs to the third 
floor I asked her why he did that. She answered 
vaguely that they were rude. 

I came to Miss Jackson's because her mother and my 
mother knew each other, and because it is eminently 
respectable. As we climbed the dark stairs my elation 
dropped from me. The hall needs the winds of heaven 
to blow through it. Coming back to dinner, I fairly 
groped through the dimness. But the dining-room 
was bright and cheerful. All the people seemed young. 
They were very gay. At dinner the whole talk was of 
the theatre. As I have not been to a play since I was 
eighteen, I sat stupidly quiet. Everybody went out 
after dinner — most of them to the theatre. Miss 
Jackson went, too. Up in my room I leaned from the 
window and tried to realize the wonderfulness of beinjr 
in New York. Below me the street was dark, but far 
away across the housetops I saw a glow that I took to 
be the lights of Broadway. After a long time I stole 
down the dim, depressing stairs. I opened the door, 
let in the sweet, cool April air. I don't know how long 
I stood there looking out at the dark, deserted street. 
I thought of it as a siren of the sea, calling, luring to it 
the youth of our wide, free land. My mind went to 
my little room up two dark flights of stairs. I was 
paying ten doflars a week for a room just about the 
size of the rug in front of my fireplace at home. What 



72 WIND OF DESTINY 

was the size of the working girl's room who paid five 
dollars a week? How many flights of dark stairs did 
she have to climb? I seemed to feel the city — the city 
that I have not yet seen. I seemed to feel its immen- 
sity — stretching away, street after street, in overpower- 
ing sameness the length of the island. I thought of the 
overcrowded East Side and the foreigners herded like 
cattle, overflowing into the streets, and then I thought of 
Bobby — or had I been thinking of him through all my 
thoughts? — jostling in the crowded streets, loitering, 
listening, feeling the beat of the city's great heart. 

When I closed the door and came down the hall I saw 
the telephone in spite of the dimness. Almost before 
I knew it I had found the number I sought, my hand 
was on the receiver. But I did not take it down. The 
memory of a bright-eyed little lady bird who waited 
for her lover to come to her restrained me. I must be 
as wise as she. 

I ran up to my room. A fog had crept in from the 
sea. The river must be near. The calls of whistles 
and horns came shrill and often. They seemed to give 
anxious warning. The city is a siren. It wrapped 
itseK closer in this white fog sheet of mystery and it 
called to me. Hastily I donned coat and hat, ran down 
the stairs and out on the street. I did not hesitate — 
to hesitate was to go back. In front of me, not far 
away, another street opened. I reached it, stood 



WIND OF DESTINY 73 

still for a moment; a wraithlike little figure hurried 
past. "What street is this?" I asked. Wraithlike 
he sped on without a reply. I hurried after him, caught 
him by the arm. "What street is this?" I insisted. 
"And which is up and which down?" 

" Whut's de mattei wid y'nut?" 

Humbly, I told him that I was a stranger; that I 
lived near and had just walked out for a little glimpse 
of the city. He told me to keep straight ahead until 
I came to Twenty-third Street, and stand there a while 
till the hayseeds fell off me. I gave him a dime. He 
graciously allowed me to accompany him. The city 
street widens beautifully at Twenty-third. It had 
seemed like one of our narrow mountain gulches. I 
gave my little lad another dime. I wanted to be told 
so much. The open space, vague in the fog, is Madi- 
son Square; the street that rolled away into the gloom, 
the Avenue, and the white, white foggy flare of light, 
Broadway. 

Some weight of the city's loneliness fell on me as I 
retraced my steps alone. The fog seemed denser — it 
might have been because the light lay behind. A few 
blocks down, as I turned into my own street, my own 
audacious thoughts brought me to a standstill. If I 
kept straight on I would come to Washington Square. 
An old schoolmate lived there. 

I had no difficulty in recognizing the Arch, the cross 



74 WIND OF DESTINY 

on the church, the hght that burns always. I found 
the number. I would have thought I had made a 
mistake, but I have written it so often. I went up the 
bare, worn steps, rang a jangly bell. A slatternly 
woman came to the door. Back of her I could see a 
dingy hall lighted by a blinking gas jet. She called 
my friend loudly. There was no reply. She said her 
work was heavier in the spring, that she was often very 
late. 

I had pictured my artist friend in her studio home 
surrounded with comfort. *'Hasn't she a studio?" I 
stammered. The woman laughed loudly. "Her room, 
third floor back, ain't no bigger 'n yo' hand. She 
paints an' sews an' cooks, eats an' lives an' sleeps there, 
'cept when she got jobs out." 

I turned and fled. I was trembling so I could hardly 
stand. Such a fragile, lovely creature — my friend 
back in my school-girl days. A joyous young creature, 
fashioned for joy. I did not want to see her; I knew 
instinctively that she did not want to see me. 

On the street again, out of the foggy darkness, a 
shadow lurched toward me. I shrank against the 
building I was passing. It bent and looked into my 
face, laughed drunkenly, and passed on. I tried to 
move. My limbs had taken root. As I stood there 
flattened against that wall I heard cautious, descending 
footsteps, whispering voices. Some people were com- 



WIND OF DESTINY 75 

ing down nearby steps, and I was glad. I would follow 
close behind them. After what was to me a very long 
time, as they did not pass, I went in the direction of 
their voices, until I stumbled over a dark mass that lay 
in my path. Something told me. The slow, cautious 
steps, the whispering voices — I dropped to my knees 
on the pavement. The face I lifted and looked into 
was a young girl's. She was unconscious. I sprang 
up. There was movement in my limbs now. I ran, 
breathless, into a man. I caught him by the arm, 
pleading with him to hurry; I dragged him to the girl 
on the pavement. I gasped out all I knew. 

He took a flashlight from somewhere about him, 
knelt, looked at the girl, and I — I looked at the pool of 
blood widening on the pavement. I had not seen it be- 
fore. She was dying. I dropped down by her, too. 
*'0h, poor little girl," I cried, *'why did you come to 
this city of Gomorrha.'^ Why didn't you stay at 
home.^" 

"See here" — the light flashed full In my own face, 
the low, cold voice bit into my spirit as a bullet of steel 
might have burrowed in my flesh — "how do I know 
that what you've told me is on the level .^^ " 

Stupidly I stared at him. Whose face was this — 
as familiar as my own viewed in the looking-glass .^^ 

The eyes looking into mine were suddenly confused, 
the apology he gave murmured. He stared as though 



76 WIND OF DESTINY 

I bewildered him. He pushed his hat back. I hadn't 
recognized Bobby Haralson, but I knew that lock of 
hair on his brow. Had I not once watched a flame de- 
vour it? Head and heart awhirl, I smiled at him. 
"Mr. Haralson," I said, and I laughed outright. "I 
am on the level." 

There was the sound of approaching footsteps. He 
flashed the light out. " So you know me.^^ " he said. 

*'Who does not?" I answered. *'But you do not 
know me, honest, now." 

"I do — and I don't," he said. 

Not far away a figure loomed; it brought us back to 
the poor little girl that lay there so quietly between us. 

"You must get away, quickly. Oflficer!" he called. 
His voice has a carrying quality if it is so low, for soon 
an answering hail came through the fog. 

"Will you go? Go!" he commanded. *'I'll see 
this through." 

"I can't," I said, and I suddenly knew that I spoke 
out of a vast content. "I'm lost. It's no use to tell 
me west. I don't know west." 

"West what?" Again his words bit into me like 
they were steel. 

"Twenty." The officer was only a few steps away 
and Bobby fairly forced it from me. 

"The Arch, the Avenue, Twentieth Street, then to 
your left." 



WIND OF DESTINY 77 

Obediently, I did it all. I am safe at Miss Jackson's. 
But, oh, will I ever sleep again.? When I close my eyes 
I see the girl's fair little face, that widening pool of 
blood; and then I see Bobby's eyes — the puzzled stir 
of memory in them. 

April 17th. 

I fell asleep at daylight this morning. When I 
waked the breeze was tossing the curtains, the sun 
shining, there was a sense of joyousness in the morning. 
I shopped with an agent — I could not have shopped 
without one. We lunched at a cunning tearoom just 
off the Avenue. I ordered just about what mammy 
would have for a guest of ours: soup, broiled chicken, 
two vegetables, a salad, a sweet, and coffee. I nearly 
fainted when I saw my bill. And then the tip! I 
would not have given it, but I saw it offered at a nearby 
table. I was confused to give it, but the pretty, re- 
fined looking girl did not seem to mind accepting it. 

This afternoon, by appointment, I met Mr. Elliott. 
Mr. Elliott is a member of the firm. He is young, 
tall, slender. Somehow I thought all publishers were 
middle-aged, stocky as to build, and with close-cut 
white moustaches. 

Mr. Elliott asked me if I had ever dined at Mou- 
quin's. His face was a compliment when I told him 
that like a little mountain boy of my acquaintance I 



78 WIND OF DESTINY 

had never "ben nowhar niir seen nothin'." I do like 
Mr. Elliott. My heart is almost leaping out of me! 
I drove straight to Mrs. Christopher again. She told 
me all the literary people go to Mouquin's. If Bobby 
should be there to-night ! If we should mee,t ! 

One A. M. 

Out of gratitude to Mrs. Christopher I must ac- 
knowledge that the girl who looked back at me from the 
mirror to-night was a stranger to me. Mr. Elliott 
did not know her, either. As I came down the boarding- 
house stairs — the parlours at present are occupied by 
people from the South and the stuffy hall is the only 
reception-room — I flushed under his gaze. It is most 
bewildering to emerge from a Marsville spinster to a 
New York belle. 

Mouquin's. A confused memory of a flight of steps, 
a clutter of tables, a sea of faces. 

"Aren't you hungry.^ Don't you like your oysters.? 
It is a trifle late for them." 

We were seated. I knew that. It was Mr. Elliott's 
voice. I knew that, too. I was glad, although he 
seemed so far away, that I had not lost him. The plate 
that was rising, falling, lurchingly, drunkenly, held 
oysters 

*' Drink your cocktail." Out of the blur of things he 
pushed it toward me. Obediently I drank it. I saw 



WIND OF DESTINY 79 

that the oysters numbered six, that their shells were as 
pink and polished as a lady's finger-nails. Obediently 
I ate them — the oysters, not the shells. 

"What makes you so quiet to-night? But maybe 
you aren't having a good time.^" 

With the help of the wine that sparkled and bubbled 
at my right hand, blessed little helper in time of need, 
I did not have to give account of my appetite again; 
I was making quite respectable headway with my 
chicken. Feverishly I assured Mr. Elliott that I was 
having the loveliest time but one I'd ever had in my 
life. 

Mr. Elliott beamed. "Will you tell me about that 
time.f^" he asked. 

But women have their little reserves. The lovely 
time to which I had reference was a mountain storm 
I once survived, on Craggy, six thousand feet above 
sea level, separated from my party, having followed a 
cattle path by mistake, and — alone. This time was just 
as lovely as that. Then, after a terrified scurrying 
here and there, I had gone back to the mountain top to 
wait. Out of what had seemed an innocent sky an 
electric storm broke. Lashing his steeds with whips of 
fire, Apollo drove them across the boiling heavens. 
At each ear-crashing report of thunder the earth threat- 
ened to crumble, hurling me down through bottomless 
space. With the sharp hissings of snakes the lightning 



80 WIND OF DESTINY 

fell about me. Rain-drenched, storm-torn, but too 
terrified to brave the electric fires darting across the 
mountain's top to what seemed safety under the big 
rock where a flock of frightened sheep huddled, I took 
the storm in the open. When it had rolled away the 
sheep no longer huddled — I was indeed alone — they 
lay still. 

"Does it meet your approval.^" Mr. Elliott put the 
direct question to me, and somehow I knew it had been 
asked before. I looked down at my plate helplessly — 
we had reached the salad course — I tried to rouse my 
laggard brain. Approval of what, and what was ap- 
proval.^ 

"It gets my goat!" The words came from my lips. 
My ears heard them. And the fright of the foolish 
words cleared my brain. 

" What ! " There was astonishment, there was amuse- 
ment, there was also a puzzled intentness in the eyes 
that looked into mine, and I stammered that the girl 
who sat at the next table — the girl who looked so cul- 
tured and smartly got up — had just said it, and that 
it was new to me, but it sounded like an idiom of the 
street. 

With that careless, satiated New York glance Mr. 
Eliott's eyes swept the girl. "Beef to the heel," he 
said heartlessly. 

"Beef to the heel ! " That puzzled me, too. 



WIND OF DESTINY 81 

We had drained our coffee cups when two people 
who sat at a table behind us passed— a man and a wo- 
man—Bobby Haralson and Dicky. I recognized Bobby 
as I came in; the lovely droop of Dicky's back is not 
unfamiliar to me, either. 

*' That's Bob Haralson — you've heard of him — one 
of our biggest men, and his biggest work is still in him. 
He's the nicest, most lovable, queerest fellow you ever 
did see. He has hosts of friends, but mostly, he lives 
to himself. He'd give his last dollar to a friend and 
go hungry himself; and once I knew him to refuse to be 
introduced to a rich fellow of power in the literary 
world because that man belonged soul and body to a 
corporation— had been bought. That's Bob Haralson ! 
I often see him here, but I never saw him here with a 
woman before. Come to think of it, I never saw him 
anywhere before with a woman — ^not much in his line, 
women. But they seemed to be having a corking 
time. I never saw him so animated. That little 
witch— pretty, wasn't she?— has got him going. I'd 
have asked him over to be introduced had he been 
alone." 

As we left the restaurant Mr. Elliott asked me to go 
with him to a little theatre where the one-act plays 
were all thrills. I couldn't tell him that if I had any 
more thrills he'd probably have to call an ambulance 
and send me to a hospital; I couldn't explain that as 



82 WIND OF DESTINY 

far as I was concerned the play was done, curtain down, 
and lights out. 

We went. We sat in darkness. The darkness was 
a great relief. Mr. Elliott could not see me. I sat 
there with tightly shut eyes until, at a stir among the 
people about me, I heard some one say a man had 
fainted. "It gets my goat!" I murmured. Fortu- 
nately there was quite a little stir about us and Mr. 
Elliott did not hear me. 

April 18tL 

Some hours ago, when I left New York, having de- 
cided to run up to Plymouth and finish up the work on 
the book by the sea, Mr. Elliott put me in the coach, 
having showered me with books, flowers, and maga- 
zines. I opened the flowers in the cab, and I stared at 
them and at him. 

"Don't you like them?" 

Did I like orchids and lilies of the valley .^^ Bobby's 
Christmas gift to me.^^ I pulled up. I wasn't going 
to be beef to the heel. I joined the New York proces- 
sion — and I think I made good. 

There's a little slit of a mirror in the coach, right here 
by my chair, and I take a peep at myself. Blessings 
on Mrs. Christopher, I don't look like a spinster, and 
from Marsville. And then — then I bury my face 
in nice Mr. Elliott's flowers, drinking in their per- 



WIND OF DESTINY 83 

fume, and splashing them with some very big and salty 
tears. 

April 25th. 

I have spent the morning in Plymouth's quaint old 

graveyard — such a soft, sunny, springlike morning. 

I have looked at the dim old slabs that bear testimony 

to the virtue of departed wives. I am sitting on the 

grave of a virtuous wife now, looking past the stones, 

past the big rock the nimble Pilgrims leaped on when 

they landed on free soil, far out to where sea and sky 

meet. Had I been a Puritan maid I would have said 

to my lover when we climbed to this hill soft days like 

this and looked to sea: "Dear boy, with my heart I give 

you all that women who are like me give to one man — 

the thoughts I have kept for you, the lips I have kept 

for you. If you had a great searchlight and should 

throw it back over the road of my life there's not a single 

little bend that it would shame me for your eyes to see; 

but when I'm dead, don't put my virtue on a tombstone." 

April 26th. 
This has been a heavenly day. Mr. Elliott came to 
Boston on business and ran down to Duxbury to see 
some friends of his, and all of them motored over to 
Plymouth and got me. I lunched at the loveliest 
home in Duxbury. The sea was almost in the back 
porch. Mr. Elliott came back in the machine with me 



84 WIND OF DESTINY 

and took the train for Boston. When he left he held 
my hands in a mighty close friendly clasp, and he 
said — never mind what he said. It is lovely of Mr. 
Elliott to be so good to me, and it's comforting down to 
my toes. For some idiotic reason I want to cry again. 
I won't cry! And I won't sit here. (I have climbed 
to the old graveyard, and seated myself on the slab 
of a virtuous spouse.) I need all my nerve force. It 
must sparkle in the changes I've got to put in my book. 
And I know why I'm nervous, and I know why I want 
to cry. It's always satisfactory when you can chase an 

emotion to its lair I was taken to the graveyard 

when I was very little — mammy used to take me with 
her when she went to put flowers on my great-aunt's 
grave, the lady whose false teeth fell into mammy's 
care; and she (mammy) was always so solemn on these 
occasions — it was before the day of Christian Science — 
there was death then, and hell, and a devil. I feel 
quite cheerful since I have analyzed the teary feeling. 

April ^6th. 

Night. 
A letter from Dicky forwarded to New York and on 
here. It lilts like the song of the happy little wren 
that was singing in the big cedar tree at the garden 
gate the day I left home. 

"Oh, Caroline," Dicky says, *'I want to go out under 



WIND OF DESTINY 85 

the stars to-night at home and bury my face in the 
pansies that always riot in your April garden. With 
their soft little faces close, close to mine, I want to 
tell them a secret. I want to tell it to you, too, Caro- 
line. But not yet — not yet." 

I go out under the stars, through the quiet streets, 
and down to the quiet sea. The night is poignantly 
sweet and beautiful. Dicky, little sister, child of my 
love, keep your secret. I could not bear to hear it 
yet — not yet. 

April 27th. 

A telegram from Bobby. He wants to come to 
Plymouth. He has something to tell me. It is Bob- 
by's chivalry that makes him feel he should go through 
the form of asking me for Dicky. I have wired no. 
There's a little kodak of him that I cut from a magazine 
and put in my little silver frame. I can reach out my 
hand and touch it here where I sit, and, vaguely, it 
comforts me. 

I have faced it. I love Bobby. To love — it is to 
give. Bobby's wife must give. The hands that take 
into their keeping that precious thing — his genius — 
what tender, comprehending hands they must be. 
There'll be times, lots of 'em, when Bobby's wife will 
have to do all the loving for two. There'll be times 
when he will thrust her out, and if she sits whimpering 



86 WIND OF DESTINY 

on the doorstep that It's cold out there, heaven help 
her — how he'll hate her. There'll be times when the 
work presses, when he's distrait — ^knows she's there 
just as he knows the housefurnishings are there, bed 
near centre of room, bureau against west wall, light 

above If she gets frightened at the wilted leaves 

and jerks his love for her out of his body to look at the 
roots too often, then heaven help you, Robert Haralson. 
Bobby, Bobby, I'd know at a glance — without a 
glance. When you opened the door I'd feel, Bobby. 
Sometimes her tired-out man child quivering with his 
day's toil asks mother love of his wife. She's got to be 
counsellor, comforter, friend — comrade with whom to 
forget life's cares. Out of all the world she's got to be 
the one woman that is his need. I am your need ! 
If disaster stripped you of all that the world has show- 
ered on you, if it reduced you to the hurdy-gurdy man 
who grinds his organ under your window — Bobby, 
Bobby, would Dicky love the gathering of the pennies? 

April 28th. 
Morning. 
Bobby wires again: "What are you up to, Caroline, 
that you didn't let me know you were here, that Dicky 
didn't know; that Elliott wasn't told it was Dicky with 
me; that you were so naughty in the Square the other 
night as to laugh at my confusion? Little girl with eyes 



WIND OF DESTINY 87 

like moonflowers, all right for yoiise. And mums the 
word." 

"Her eyes, full and clear, with their white-encircled, 
gray irises, are like moonflowers." That's what Bobby 
says on page 131 about his heroine. And back in one 
of his first letters to me, "Please turn to page 131 of the 
book and try to think whose eyes I tried to describe." 

April mth. 

Noon. 
On the heels of Bobby's telegram I have this letter 
from him. 

To-day, Wednesday. 
My Dear Caroline Howard : 

Please hurry up and get all the sea air you want, and 
go up to Boston and let them show you Milk Street 
and the Youth's Companion building (that's all there 
is there). Oh, I forgot the beautiful men. Look 
'em over! I've seen 'em. They all carry a black 
network bag with a MS. play, and Emerson, and two 
watercress sandwiches for lunch in it. All right for 
youse. Do you know I have an idea that you'll meet 
your fate up there among the Baked Beans. I'm told 
those Apollo "Belvidears" always take to a girl that's 
both intelligent and good looking. Get that.? Well, I 
won't send you a wedding present — so, there! 

But, speaking seriously, we've had rain here all day. 
It's been cold, too — kind of like late of an evening when 
you go down barefoot in the ten-acre medder to drive 
the cow home, and your mind is on whippoorwills and 
stone bruises and Cherokee roses and hot corn-pone, 
and the little girl with the white sunbonnet on the ad- 



88 WIND OF DESTINY 

joining farm that you saw picking cherries in the lane, 
and who you (I don't mean you, I mean me) fondly 
imagine is going to come over to your farm some day 
and scold you when the cow doesn't come home, but 
who really runs away with a patent churn agent and 
winds up by keeping a shooting gallery in South Bend, 
Indiana. 

Oh, well, what's the odds ? 

Hope you are feeling quite well after your long trip 
from the soggy south. 

Now while you are up "No'th" just turn yo'self a' 
loose and have a good time. Down in our country the 
old-time opinion is that Liberty Jams everything into 
a bad shape, but it ain't so. No — the real and genuine 
liberty sets you Free; it doesn't cramp you or lower 
your ideals at All. 

A great many wise people have learned that; you see 
Them Everywhere in Greater New York. And I think 
you would like to bring your cow up here and spend 
the remainder of your time. You can live nicely on 
fifty cents a week; but a great deal better on half a billion 
dollars. 

Since I have discovered what a help printed matter is 
to me, I simply love to write letters. I know a man who 
writes 1,900 letters a day to his Loved One. But don't 
you think he is kind of "crowdin' " the mourners? 

Please ma'am write to me some more right away; I 
like to hear from you. 

P.S. I've had a great time chopping up the papers 
and building this letter. You'll excuse my frivolous- 
ness, won't you? 

Bob. 



Bobby, I condone your offense — time spent cutting 
up the papers, time worth so many cents per word, to 



WIND OF DESTINY 89 

amuse me. Times spent together when apart, how 
close they come. 

April ^9tk. 
Morning. 

How the sea flashes, and the blue, blue sky flashes, 
too. There's a boat drifting this way. It looks like a 
white-winged gull afloat, a messenger of joy. How the 
waves sing, and their swelling song is all about a little 
girl in a white sunbonnet picking cherries in the lane. I 
remember that day, too, Bobby. It was a picnic. You 
climbed the tree and I caught up my dress to catch 
the big ripe cherries. When the picnic was over and 
we got home my gentle mother scolded over the ruined 
dress. She gave it to the washerwoman's little girl. 

How the waves sing, and their shouting song is — 
Bobby's loved one. 

Afternoon. 

The day's mood has changed. A cold wind blows 
in from the sea. If mammy could see me out here on 
this deserted stretch of shore in the rain and the spray 
that dashes on me from the stormy, inrushing waves 
she'd say her prayers in thankfulness that she put the 
old storm coat and rubbers in, for I've got them on. 

How fierce the rush of the waves! Something as 
elementally savage as their assault of the shore stirs in 
me, writhes in its travail — is born. Bobby is mine. 

Dicky, light-hearted, laughing child who would pluck 



90 WIND OF DESTINY 

the flower of love as a baby gathers a posy, forgive 
me. 

When the day is hot and the road is long, and the 
flower of love droops, what then, Dicky? 

Night 
I have wired Bobby that I will be in New York Wed- 
nesday. It will take me that long to finish the changes 
in the book. I wired him that my train gets in about 
five-thirty, and that if he likes I will take dinner with 

him. 

A'pril SOth. 
Bobby's wire reads : 

Sure, Mike, I'll be on hand at 5 :30 Wednesday to wel- 
come you on your retreat from Bosting. And don't 
bother yourself about the train getting in at six or 
later, for I'll be on the job and I'll be there when you 
get there. 

I have already ordered the lye hominy and turnip 
greens for dinner, and you'll be properly looked after 
by the committee of one when you hit the town. 

Hoping these few lines will find you the same, I remain. 
Yours continuously, B. 

May 1st. 
Bobby wasn't at the train. If he was, we missed 
each other. I wasn't conscious of it on the train, but 
now I know I pictured him there at the station, stand- 
ing just a little in advance of the mass of people; 
vaguely, I think my mind ran the gamut of earth's 
meetings and thought of dim shores, not of earth, where 



WIND OF DESTINY 91 

that one who goes first must surely await the other. 
To the whir of the wheels as they ate up the railes that 
lie between Boston and New York my heart sang, 
Bobby's loved one, Bobby's loved one. I was in a 
maze of vague, happy thought — and he wasn't there — 
he didn't meet me. 

It is 12 p. M. now. I went with Miss Jackson to a 
horrid little show, and when we came in I could not be- 
lieve there was not a message of some sort for me. 

May 2d. 

I stayed in all morning in such a tense state of ex- 
pectancy that it has left me limp. How glad I am that 
Dicky does not know I am here — I simply can't see 
Dicky yet. I am at sea as to Bobby's reason for not 
meeting me, at sea that no message from him comes to 
me, but one thing I know: I can trust his, ''Mum's the 
word, Caroline." 

Mrs. Christopher and I shopped this afternoon. 
Afterward we had tea at the Astor and went down to 
the Waldorf and sat in Peacock Alley. Such a mix up 
of fine clothes and commonness. The women have 
hard faces, painted, world-weary, they are too much of 
— oh, everything: too red as to lips, too black as to 
eyebrows, too gold as to hair; they don't walk — they 
can't, poor things — their general appearance as they 
mince along the Avenue is that of a procession of man- 



92 WIND OF DESTINY 

nikins done up in slit bolster cases. Bah ! It all makes 
me think of a big rock near Marsville. Once I passed 
it with a mountaineer. "When I wuz a child," he 
said, "that wuz a monster rock — the masterest (big- 
gest) rock I ever seed. Hit's dwindled sence I wuz a 
child." Since I reached here New York's dwindled. 

" Caroline Howard," I said to myself, sternly, out in 
the street again, "it isn't New York that has dwindled 
— it is you. Robert Haralson didn't meet you. What- 
ever his reason for a dime he could have 'phoned from 
his home; a slot machine would have cost him a nickel, 
a note a two-cent stamp." 

My shoulders braced, my chin went up, my spirit 
caught the spirit of this great wonder-town. Night 
fell. The magic of night on Broadway — the flashing 
signs, the whizzing motors, the hurrying, surging 
throngs, the snatches of speech that drift to one's ears, 
there on the street where all seems youth, laughter, 
joy — human documents, the snatches of speech one 
hears. "How can I leave you here.?^" I heard the 
words spoken by a plain anxious-faced woman, and 
the overdressed, under-dressed, doll-faced girl's an- 
swer: "You poor dear! How you worry! What have 
I to fear? New York's lovely, and my job's lovely, 
and my boss is loveliest of all." 

I heard a man's voice, such a cultured, hearty sort of 
a voice, but a note of bitterness and discouragement 



WIND OF DESTINY 93 

rang through it. "That man — I gave him his chance — 
brought him here. Look where he is now, and look 
where I am. He is not an artist. His success is not 
based on a sohd foundation. But look at him — money 
— fame — what's the use of holding to one's ideals, of 
being faithful to them. What's the use of — any- 
thing?" 

My train goes out in an hour. City of laughter and 
of tears, of power that can crush as a giant foot crushes 
an ant, marvel of the world — I bid you adieu. 

May 4iih. 
Sunday Night. 
I've broken the Sabbath by travelling all day. In 
town I hired a buggy to bring me home. Our hacks 
do not run on Sunday. It is raining. It has rained 
all the way. I had a silent driver who never spoke to 
me, seldom to his horses. I was glad that it was raining; 
glad that my driver was silent. My thoughts were as 
vague, as blurred as the dim mountain forms seen 
through the rain. We drove through Marsville with- 
out meeting a soul. As we passed the Duckett houses 
that forever watch each other like antagonists, I saw 
that poor old lady slipping home from doing up his 
work; I saw him rocking on his front porch in placid 
content. A sudden rage against this man-made world 
seized me. 



94 WIND OF DESTINY 

I scrambled in my bag for the little gift to her, leaped 
out, and sent the man on home with my baggage. 

He greeted me jauntily. He was just sitting there 
counting his blessings. He could eat three as hearty 
meals a day as he had ever et, and when night come 
sleep sound as a mouse in a shuck pen — the Lord had 
been good to the old man. 

I wasn't hypocrite enough to take the hand extended. 
I wanted to shake the life out of his smiling old body. 

"Has he been good to the old lady.^" I asked. He 
only stared at me. "Do you know you told me you 
swam your horse through swollen streams once to get 
to a little log church because you knew your congrega- 
tion would be waiting for you there? You wanted to 
preach that sermon that day that some soul might 
be saved that you might never reach again. You said 
you didn't want the devil to get anybody. Do you 
remember?" 

"Yes," he quavered, "I remember." 

"Well," I stormed, "it's my honest belief that he will 
get you. I wonder what the God you have preached 
all these years means to do with men like you who are 
mean to their wives and cloak their meanness to poor 
feeble old women under smooth-sounding texts." 

He stood up, his faded blue eyes flashed, his pallid 
lips under the straggly white moustache worked. When 
he dropped back in his chair, having uttered no word, I 



WIND OF DESTINY 95 

thought maybe I had killed him. But I did not care. 
He would have gone to his Maker with a little prepara- 
tion he would otherwise not have had. I stood over 
him silent, inexorable. 

"She got mad because " 

" Never mind what she got mad about," I said. "For 
fifty-nine years and six months she didn't get mad. 
And she's not mad now. I saw her slipping out of the 
back of your house just a minute ago. She's been doing 
up your night work. You ought to go over there and 
get down on your knees — the knees you have worn out 
praying the Lord to make you the sort of a man you 
have not desired to be — and ask her to forgive you, and 
bring her home." 

Some good honest blood left in the old veins crept 
up and tinged the pallid, sunken cheeks. And, suddenly, 
all my fierceness was gone. I was pleading for the love 
that had betrayed them at the end of a lifetime. I had 
his old, old hands in mine that looked so young and 
strong by contrast, and I was leading him back to their 
courtship days, to the time when their one little child 
was born and she almost lost her life. Some of the 
story I knew from him, and some of it I knew from her. 
Before I finished the tears were dropping down his 
cheeks. " The old man has some lonely hours," he said. 
Gayly I told him they were over; gayly I pressed my gift 
into his hand, and I fairly pushed him into her gate. 



96 WIND OF DESTINY 

As I hurried on I suddenly realized that the rain was 
over, that the eastern hills were sparkling under a giant 
rainbow, and that Ellinor Baxter was rushing toward 
me with outstretched hands. Ellinor threw as many 
of her pupils as she could on her assistant, and, with the 
help of one of the older girls, took my pupils in my 
absence. 

*'How radiant you look!" I said as I kissed her. "I 
was afraid you would be all dragged out with the 
children." 

"The children," she said, vaguely, and then flushing 
like a rosy girl she plunged into stories of the children's 
good behaviour. She turned and walked homeward with 
me. Was it that fleeting brightness in the sky that made 
her seem so young and bright and strangely changed? 

May 15th. 
School closed to-day. Commencement was quite a 
triumph. Monday morning I went to work in the 
schoolroom, examinations and commencement exercises 
on hand. Suddenly the play I had seen with Miss 
Jackson and thought so bad came into my mind. 
The more I thought of it the better it seemed. I de- 
cided on tableaux, my ideas got from that play. There 
were just fourteen days in which to work it out, but the 
children hailed it with joy. It was something new; 
it was something different. Ellinor's help was invalu- 



WIND OF DESTINY 97 

able. Marsville was delighted with it. Ellinor is 
changed. If there was anybody here to love I'd think 
she was in love. She was running to angles, and now 
she's got some pretty curves, the gray hairs are quite 
hidden by the new way she is doing her lovely, heavy, 
red-brown hair, and her soft brown eyes — they are 
looking out on the spring world with a new, wistful 
expression in them. She smiles so easily and she hums 
snatches of tender old songs. 

May %^d. 
Midnight. 
This afternoon there was an unfamiliar knock at the 
door and I ran down without waiting for mammy. It 
was Mr. Elliott. He looked so foreign to the old place, 
so New Yorkish standing there, that quite without 
warning, in the way I do things, while my lips were 
speaking a welcome and he was following me into the 
sitting-room, something within me was singing: "How 
could I know I should love thee afar, when I did not 
love thee anear.^^" But that something within me was 
not singing about Mr. Elliott, although I saw the glad 
light in his eyes. My own eyes saw the sun-shot 
green May -mist of the trees in Madison Square, the 
clock's big face above the treetops, against the sky's 
soft blue the radiant, triumphant Diana. My ears 
heard the roll of wheels on the Avenue, the clang of cars 



98 WIND OF DESTINY 

on Broadway; my veins felt the beat of the city's 
hurrying, feverish hfe. 

Out under the pines where mammy brought tea and 
helped me, with the dignity of a departed day, I still 
felt alien to it all. Mr. Elliott praised the beaten bis- 
cuit, and she told him as a mark of special favour the 
story of receiving my great aunt's teeth when she was 
dying. I could not seem to belong to the scene — the 
big waving pine plumes against the spring sky, the 
ancient house drowsing in peace, the soft sweep of the 
hills, the mounta ns against the sky like a string of 
sapphires. But when Mr. Elliott said good-bye, when 
he caught my hands and poured out a flood of eager 
words, "Would I.'^ Could I.^" I came back to reality. 

Did it mean that, this feel of the city? Could I go 
back and live there with Mr. Elliott — dear, charming, 
nice Mr. Elliott. For one swift instant I was swept by 
his belief in what we together might make of life, and 
it seemed so infinitely more than I could make of life 
alone. For one swift instant that old terror — the 
inevitableness of human change — pierced me like a 
sword. Always I have felt a contemptuous sort of 
pity for Jane Joyner, who lives near, toothless and un- 
tidy and incapable as she is, with the house running 
over with dirty children. Was Jane to be pitied? 
Jane whose youth and beauty were not dead but had 
passed into another form of life — lived in her children. 



WIND OF DESTINY 99 

Was she out of harmony with hfe's great laws? Big 
and fierce my heart cried out, "No!" It was I who 
was outside of hfe, not Jane. Her man's arm went 
round her shoulders n ghts when she stood over the 
kitchen stove. Her baby lifted its dirty, loving, laugh- 
ing little face to hers as it clutched her knees. Taking 
my lonely after-supper walk I had seen them through 
the open kitchen door. \Miat had I.'* A dream that 
was bodiless, life emptied of the big, vital things. And 
if I sent Mr. Elliott away as I sent the others, the boy 
lovers who came over the mountains to tell me what he 
is telling me now.^ What have I left that is more than 
I refuse ? In the bare, honest moment I faced it. Bleak 
and stark in its honesty, the truth faced me. After 
work hours when I walk in the twilight and look in 
Jane Joyner's kitchen the thing that comes close to my 
heart is a dream without a body — nothing more. 

"I thought I was happy until you came along," Mr. 
Elliott was saying. "Then I found out how lonely 
my gayety was." 

He is strong and fine, capable of making a woman 
happy, and I hold the future of our two lives in my 
hands. And then he was drawing me to him. Almost, 
his lips touched mine. The quick revolt, the wave of 
physical nausea — it was as though an icy, sinister wind 
had swooped down on my blooming flowers and shriv- 
elled them. 



100 WIND OF DESTINY 

With a desolate little smile I drew back from him, 
an alien standing outside of all that might have been 
mine. I bade him good-bye, and to-night, when I 
walked by Jane's kitchen, open to the soft night, I 
turned my eyes away, afraid to look in on the sweet 
little home scene. In all my life I have never felt so 
alone. 

Wednesday Morning. 
Mr. Elliott sent back a wonderful basket of fruit. 
It came over on the hack and the whole village is agog 
over it. The goss p has disturbed dear old mammy 
greatly. She suggests that we still the gossip and 
flatter our neighbours by giving a party. Then they 
won't know what to th'nk. I have consented. Mammy 
is a woman of action. The party comes off this after- 
noon. The house hums with activity. 

Wednesday Afternoon. 
The party has passed into history. I got only the 
littlest taste of the contents of that beautiful basket Mr. 
Elliott sent me. Everybody was here, and they all 
seemed to have such a good time. Even the reconciled 
Ducketts tottered over. What a success I seem to be 
at reuniting severed hearts. If my book is a failure 
I may set up an establishment of the sort — go into a 
trance and vision dazzling futures for people. Well, 
how do I like the idea.'^ Seven days ago had I put the 



WIND OF DESTINY lOl 

question to myself my spirit would have flung back in 
bitterness, "Physician, heal thyself." 

For seven nights, no matter which way I willed my 
feet to go, they have led me past Jane's kitchen door. 
Alone in the soft spring darkness, in the soft wet dark- 
ness some of the nights, I have faced my life. I have 
looked in that open door till the bitterness and the 
loneliness have gone out of me. Last night when her 
man's arms went about her as she dished their supper, 
when her child's arms reached up to her, I looked in, 
not in bitterness, not in pity of self, not in aching lone- 
liness, but in love. It is wonderful when you can look 
in on untidy Janes at their kitchen tasks and feel close 
to their happiness. Life's supremest gift is hers. 
Almost, it was mine. Not a makeshift, not a compro- 
mise — life's supremest gift. Across sunlit waves a boat 
like a white-winged gull set sail for me. Almost, it 
reached me. How my heart went out to that white 
drifting boat of prophecy! How the waves sang! 
Bobby's loved one. Sunlit waves and flashing white- 
winged boat are gone. But the singing soul of those 
words shall keep my heart young. It shall be tender 
to the young and happy, pitiful to the old and alone, 
compassionate to all untouched by love, whether they 
scoff in unbelief or whether they would lay down their 
lives for love. 

Oh, how tired I am! And how heavy the silence is 



102 WIND OF DESTINY 

here in the brideHke, white lovehness of my May gar- 
den ! And how this silence differs from its fall silences ! 
The silence holds resignation in the fall — this is tense 
with expectancy. The snowballs that have come so 
late this year are swaying, they seem to be beckoning 
to some one, but there is no wind. And the lilies of 
the valley, late, too — my flower children delayed their 
blooming till I came home — are swaying; they are pour- 
ing out their fragrance — it is poignantly, deliciously 
sweet, but I feel no wind. 

Something is the matter with this garden and with 
me. I am quivering all over as if with intense excite- 
ment. The party has tired me out. Just then, when 
John opened the gate, I almost leaped from this bench. 

The letters John has brought me are from Mr. 
Elliott and Dicky. I open Mr. Elliott's first — a woman 
always opens a man's letter first. It is a fine, manly 
letter, and it ends : 

"You said you once knew Bob Haralson. He has 
been at death's door — struck down without a moment's 
warning — appendicitis — a knife quick or death opera- 
tion. It was the day you came down from Boston. 
I remember date because you came down from Boston. 
Haralson is creeping about. I saw him yesterday." 

The lines of mountains dance dizzily. I shut my 
eyes — shut out the spring glory, my fingers making a 
pressing blackness against my eyeballs. I try to imag- 



WIND OF DESTINY 103 

ine the world this spring day with Bobby gone out of it. 
Then my heart leaps madly. It is explained— ea;- 
plained. 

I can't sit still, so I climb to the hilltop. I am calmer 
in motion. I can see the village from the hilltop. It is 
being claimed by the twilight, the soft, slow, lingering 
spring twilight. There must be a lot of moisture to 
make such a brilliant aftermath. The heavens are so 
pink they have tinged the eastern hills. League on 
league the cloud waves blush pink as the heart of a sea- 
shell. The whole world glows. My mood catches 
the sky's glowing mood. It is explained. He has been 
ill unto death, but he is not dead— he is alive— «ZiVe. 

Something drops from my belt and I pick it up and 
stare at it stupidly. It is Dicky's little letter. Dicky 
will know about Bobby. She will explain their pres- 
ence together that night at Mouquin's. 

"Caroline, is your right hand paralyzed that I don't 
hear from you.? Do a lot of little tow-headed moun- 
taineers and a garden that I know is at its loveliest 
now mean more to you than I do.? I can't understand 
your silence. I am coming home. I am to have my 
vacation now, and I am to keep on having it. Some- 
body's with me. He is the secret of the prolonged vaca- 
tion. I guess it will be in June. That's the loveliest 
time of all. He will be here only a day or two, three 
at the longest, and I hate to think of him at that dinky 



104 WIND OF DESTINY 

little Marsville hotel. Hotel! Ye gods! Come to 
New York and we will show you some hotels. Dearest, 
won't you, won't you, have him home with us.f^ There 
are some such ducks of places to spoon these moonlit 
nights in that heavenly rose garden of yours." 

Did I cry out in that sharp pain or was it some 
wounded thing out there in the shadow of the woods? 
Steadily I finish the letter. It is to-day — now, at 
twilight — when the hack gets in, that Dicky and her 
lover are coming. She apologizes that we do not 
know earlier, but mammy and I are equal to any emer- 
gency. I do feel sorry for mammy, but I walk on 
straight into the sunset glare, leaving mammy to her 
fate. That is my only sensation — I am sorry for 
mammy. She does love to splurge when company 
comes. 

Far down the road I see a buggy. It is coming this 
way. There are two people in it, but it is too far away 
to recognize faces. It is two men. It stops. One 
man gets out, the other turns the buggy around and 
drives back toward the village. The man who got out 
of the buggy walks on in the rose-red haze that wraps 
the world. The lilies of the valley that I thrust in my 
belt send out a sudden fragrance — it is the trembling 
of my body that has shaken them. I stop because 
I can't walk on. I lean against a friendly tree-trunk. 

The man comes on, moving slowly, feebly, I see as 



WIND OF DESTINY 105 

he gets nearer. I think of trivial things, as we do In 
crislc moments. Bobby Is taller than I thought. The 
hat he Is wearing adds distinction to one who Is al- 
ready distingue. The crease In his trousers will be 
copied by the young men of Marsville. From some- 
where In me a faint satisfaction stirs that the party 
has left me wearing my best new gown, my hair done 
in a New York way. 

Almost at my side Bobby stops, panting a little. I 
speak first. Women always do. I feel sure Eve 
opened the conversation when Adam waked from the 
sleep that deprived him of a rib and supplied him with a 
wife. 

''So you have come again — and not alone this time.'* 
It is not in the least what I meant to say. 

"Did you know that I came.?" Bobby's low voice 
holds a note of surprise. "How did you know.? But I 
suppose the boy told you.' 

"I was in the garden. I saw you. I know why you 
came, and why you left." 

"Why did I leave.?" 

"You ran from a youthful Ideal." 

"Men have done more foolish things," Bobby's 
answer comes gravely. 

"And wiser." I hate the mocking laughter that 
escapes my lips. 

"I don't understand you." His face has grown 



106 WIND OF DESTINY 

whiter; it has changed subtly. "Has Elhott been 
here? Is it Elhott?" 

I sweetly assure him that Mr. Elliott has been here, 
and I manage to leave the impression that he may be 
coming again. 

This time Bobby's face goes close to black. With a 
mocking little bow he bids me good-bye, turns, goes 
down the road. He marches straight ahead. I have 
never seen a lion stalk through an African jungle, but 
I think of one as I look at him. Where is he going .^^ 
WTiere is Dicky's lover going .^^ A dumb sort of fright 
grips me. I spin down the road to where he marches 
breast forward with never a backward look — if a wo- 
man can spin in these narrow-not-made-to-overtake- 
anybody's-lover New York frocks. 

"Bobby," I cry, hard upon him, "stop!" 

He turns. Not the Bobby of my letters, not the 
Bobby of my dreams, not the Bobby of Washington 
Square, a politely impatient-to-be-gone stranger. 

Always, it is the unexpected that overtakes me. To 
my amazed surprise I wet with salty tears my New York 
finery. 

"I'm tired, Bobby," I gasp. "I've been having a 
party — and I'm not used to having parties. That's 
what makes me such a cat. And, oh, Bobby, you'll 
have to pardon things — Dicky just sprung your coming 
on us." 



WIND OF DESTINY 107 

**Dicky didn't know that I was coming." He speaks 
slowly, he takes my face in his hands and looks down 
at me, a long, deep look. The hard, black look on his 
own face has lifted. 

As I try to tell him that Dicky didn't tell me he was 
ill, that I have just learned it from Mr. Elliott's letter, 
as I try to tell him what the bright May world would 
be to Dicky with him gone out of it, and as I flounder 
that I hope they will be heavenly happy, I splash more 
tears on my pretty clothes. 

Bobby's face flashes — all that a woman could want 
or dream of comes into it. 

"Dicky didn't know I was in the hospital. I went 
in under an assumed name. When a fellow's tied up 

with publishers and theatrical people like I am " 

Bobby drops the subject as one that holds no further 
interest. "If I had died, would it have spoiled the 
May world for you, Caroline.?" There is a sharp note 
of anxiety in his voice. 

"Bobby, Bobby!" I cry, wildly. "Don't ask me! 
What have you done with Dicky ! Where is Dicky ? ' ' 

"I am not Dicky's keeper." The light glows and 
glows in his face. "She's got one, though, and it was 
odd we should all three have left town together. I 
smoked like a furnace all the way down as an excuse 
to keep away from them. Caroline" — Bobby's arms 
close about me — "I am not Dicky's — I am yours." 



108 WIND OF DESTINY 

Walking home in the twihght that is gray and tender 
as a dove's breast, Bobby tells me that he was afraid 
the night he ran away. He says he has tried and tried 
not to love me — that men like him should never marry 
— that they should live alone on the top of the Flat 
Iron. "But it is bigger than I," he says, gravely. "It 
has swept me to your feet." 

"To my heart," I correct, happily. 

The hack lumbers around the curve, descends upon 
us. At sight of us Dicky and the strange young man 
who sits on the back seat w th her — John and Ellinor 
are on the middle seat — roar with laughter. 

"You sly fox!" Dicky cries. "How did you get 
here? We left him on the train, Caroline, and he sent 
his regards to you — and he said he was on his way to 
Colorado." 

"I am," Bobby boldly declares. "I stopped by to 
see if Caroline would go with me. As to my getting 
here first, I live in New York. As rapid transit as is 
obtainable, say I." 

Dicky flings herself into my arms. "You owe it all 
to me," she declares. "I found him deadly tiresome." 
She beamed on Bobby. "All his talk was about you. 

"You sly fox," she whirled on him again. '^You 
didn't need to have me tell you about Caroline. You 
were hearing from her all the time, now, weren't you? 
Why didn't you tell me, Caroline?" 



WIND OF DESTINY 109 

"I — I — I " I stammered. 

Bobby isn't timid, he's bold as a lion. "The reason 
is obvious," he declares. *'I wouldn't let her. Had 
you known that I heard, too, it would have changed 
everything." 

The others descend from the hack. It goes on with 
Dicky's baggage. I realize that John has been an 
unnecessarily long time helping Ellinor out of the 
carriage; but there are no surprises left in the world. 
I greet Dicky's lover. As we take our leisurely way 
home I don't even wonder what mammy will have for 
supper. 

May SOtk. 

""Day's at the morn 
Morning's at seven; 
The hillside's dew-pearled" 

I am just back from taking a look at old Camel Back. 
The morning's like an opal — it's all a shifting mist shot 
through with sunshine. None of the mountains have 
shaken off their last night's mist-blankets but that brave 
old blessed Camel Back. He knew I'd be up, and he 
gave me royal greeting. "Well," he seemed to say, 
"haven't I poured all the treasures of the earth per- 
fumed with all the scents of Araby into your out- 
stretched hands .f^" 



110 WIND OF DESTINY 

I meant to tell Bobby about Camel Back — for so 
long I have told my fancies to a pictured Bobby — 
but when I thought of it last night, just before he left 
for the "dinky" little hotel with Dicky's doctor — 
he was busy fitting a piece of cardboard in which he 
had cut a round hole on a certain finger of my left 
hand, and, anyway, it is not easy to tell fancies to an 
eager man who is murmuring realities in one's ears — 
like this: *' Dearest one, will you hurry, oh, hurry, and 
get the gingham, and the barred muslin, and the bias 
bombazine fixed up, and let's get married quick." 

The morning's at seven. At eight all of us, Bobby 
and Dicky's doctor, Ellinor, too, are going to breakfast 
in my rose garden. Mammy planned it last night. 
She came to the sitting-room door and asked them all 
with the manner of a duchess. 

I go to the kitchen door — broiled chickens and 
waffles, strawberries and cream. "Can I help you, 
mammy?" 

"Mammy don't need no help. This come while 
you was gallivantin' up the lane." The big, bold, 
square envelope sets my heart to leaping: 

Dearest : 

I looked into my thought reservoir last night after 
I left you and discovered that if I hadn't ever met you 
before I would have loved you just the same. Is that 
disloyalty to Carrie with the gold braids and the 
capricious moods .f* No, by my halidome, no! I have 



WIND OF DESTINY 111 

two in my heart — two girls — one the ideal of romantic 
youth, the other, the completer, sweeter, better be- 
loved Caroline, but no less an ideal. Am I not the 
richest man in the world? If this be bigamy, give me 
bigamy or give me death. 

P.S. I didn't answer that question last night. 
Why did the cabby swear at you.^^ Cabbies always 
swear unless you tip them. But never mind, hereafter 
I'll be on hand to do the tipping for you. 

P.P.S. I want you, my honey. 

P.P.P.S. I need you. 



THE END 




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